In this production of The Jungle Book, our team found it important to distinguish the story we wanted to tell while acknowledging the fact that the way we presented this story matters. It’s important to say that the story we decided to tell was not of a certain culture of people or race of people, but of an orphaned girl who is being raised by wolves in the jungle. It was important to us to bring a story to the stage in an area of West Virginia that doesn’t give funding for the arts and to bring a fun and imaginative story to the youth of that area.
I assistant directed The Jungle Book while also performing as Mowgli in 2018 with the Planet X-Treme Teen Center theatre in Princeton, West Virginia. The Director was Tim Smith and we worked side by side to block and coach the other actors. When I wasn’t in a scene I would take other performers to a separate performance space to go over their individual scenes and help them dissect their characters and find their motivation in every line in their scenes. I used Stanislavski and Meisner techniques that I learned in my education and utilized them to each actors, both younger and older than myself, how to bring out their emotions and how to stay in the moment even when they didn’t have a line to say.
