Acting beyond limits: Two students who made their mark

Acting started as a way to connect—to understand others and put themselves in their shoes by acting as them. It is only through a deep understanding of the character that you can act, and it is only through deep connection and empathy that you can understand.

It started with this—we both realised we were in our last year of high school, but something was missing. We figured we needed to put ourselves out there to achieve more after SPM. As we strived to join competitions, we discovered IESAD. We chose acting, an activity we share a passion for, having had our own experiences with it in the past. 

In the end, it took one month of scattered practices to get a result we were both satisfied with. However, it came with many challenges. 

Choosing a script was one such challenge. Finding scripts with characters and storylines that we could both emulate wasn’t easy. Eventually, we settled on ‘The Hostage’, a story of two robbers who kidnapped a mean old man for ransom. 

Another challenge was capturing the characters. For this, we took them out for ice cream — really. We also attempted a prequel scene to ‘The Hostage’, a bank robbery simulation. Needless to say, it ended up being chaotic. 

Another difficulty we faced was our lack of time. Often, we visited each other’s dorms to practice late in the night after being done with our own studying. This left us exhausted almost every day, not only physically but mentally—it’s hard to keep up a high-energy performance after a draining day, but we did it anyway. We started doing improv skits as warmups, and they worked to get us into the acting state.

Apart from that, we needed eyes to analyse and give us insight into our performance, which our dormmates usually helped with. Financial support was also needed because the competition admission fee was in US dollars. Our acting video had to be good enough to convince our parents to sponsor us, so the pressure was on.

We were shocked when we received the results on a random Sunday night. We didn’t expect good results—our submission was low quality since we only used what we had. Filmed with a mere iPad camera, in our dorm, using whatever black clothes we could find. Despite that, not only did we get a gold award, exceeding our original goal, but we were also crowned international champions.

Throughout the process, it seemed like something ordinary, but looking back, we realised that it was no normal feat. Making excellence our norm, we worked hard because we knew we had no other choice. We only survived through passion and determination, and in the process, we achieved what we wanted—connection.