On the day Celia Aloma decided to become an actor, she watched The Sound of Music. Now she gets ready in Christopher Plummer’s dressing room.
Aloma is in her fourth season with the Stratford Festival, where Plummer performed for 11 seasons over the course of his life. She can’t stop smiling as she recalls her nine-year-old self watching movies at home and realizing, for the first time, that the people onscreen were performing, that “actor” was a job that she could have. As soon as she knew it was an option, she knew it was for her. Being in Plummer’s old dressing room, she tells me, “is a full-circle moment.
“That room is so hot… Everybody complains,” she added. “But I love it.”
This is the kind of excitement and gratitude that Aloma exudes throughout our conversation. She’s energized about every role she has this season — from the noble and pious Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons (directed by Esther Jun), to the insidious Gossip #3 in Sense and Sensibility (directed by Daryl Cloran), to understudying Sara Farb’s Rosalind in As You Like It (directed by Chris Abraham).
“I really got to stretch my acting muscles this year,” she said. “What a gift and an honour, really.”
Offstage, Aloma’s positivity is infectious. But onstage, in her role as Madame de Tourvel, she made me feel her character’s anguish and heartbreak.
Set in the leadup to the French Revolution, Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons explores the social world of 18th-century France’s decadent and deceitful aristocracy. As Le Vicomte de Valmont (Jesse Gervais) and La Marquise de Merteuil (Jessica B. Hill) plot and scheme their way through sex and romance, Aloma plays the virtuous young Madame de Tourvel. “She doesn’t know about that kind of society,” Aloma said about her character. “She wants to trust that there is good in people.”
Dangerous Liaisons leaves a lot of room for playfulness and humour, but generally not when Aloma is onstage. Madame de Tourvel is the emotional core of the story, and her scenes tend to focus on what Aloma calls “big feelings.
“I, for a very long time, had a hard time expressing myself through words,” Aloma told me. “So acting became a way to explore my big feelings… Being a vessel for another character really helps me get to know myself.”
It’s not surprising from her performance that she’s willing to intertwine her own emotions with her character’s. In our interview, she talks at length about the joys of getting to enter a character’s heart, to discover how they think, feel, and react to the world around them. For her, acting is personal. It’s real.
“You know you’re in it when you start having dreams about it. And I’ve had a few dreams.”
The chance to explore her emotions through acting, she told me, is “a gift, and a privilege that not everyone has, even in their own lives.” Still, accessing the emotional landscape of a character can be heavy and complicated. “Earlier in the process I was having a hard time leaving the character at the door because I felt for her so deeply,” Aloma said. She added that the show’s emotional climax “just tears your heart out.”
But, if Madame de Tourvel’s emotional journey ever gets to be too much, Aloma can tap into one of her other, vastly different characters this season. Playing one of the Gossips in Sense and Sensibility, she said, is refreshingly fun. “It’s a great contrast to have this light, bubbly, intrusive, sharp-witted character to play with,” she told me.
The Gossips serve as a sort of Greek chorus, and as Aloma explained, they take on different roles throughout the performance, playing trees at one point and a carriage at another. “The great thing about being a Gossip is our transformative nature,” Aloma said.
As for understudying Farb? “It’s been absolutely spectacular.” Aloma has particularly enjoyed exploring her character’s male alter-ego; Rosalind disguises herself as a man for much of As You Like It, and Aloma experienced “a lot of joy in finding what her masculinity was.” She has also delighted in preparing for the show as an understudy, which, she said, is “a whole different process.
“As an understudy, you always want to respect the work that the director and the principal actor put together, but you also want to bring yourself to it,” she explained. “‘How would I walk as a man?’ Finding that walk was one of my favourite things about exploring Rosalind.”
She also delights in the fact that Rosalind speaks mostly in prose, rather than in verse (a character quirk Farb also mentioned to Intermission), and she loves the playfulness of Shakespearean language. This sense of fun manifests in her go-to warmup when performing Shakespeare. “I put on my favourite rap song, the instrumental version, and I try to rap the passage to get it in my body. If I can make music out of it and rap the text myself… it comes to a point where it’s almost intuitive,” she told me. “You’re feeling the music within the language.”
No matter what role she’s playing, community is at the heart of Aloma’s love for live theatre — not just community with castmates and fellow creatives, but with the audience as well. For Aloma, “[the audience becomes] a character in the play… that you feed off of.” And when I watched Aloma perform in Dangerous Liaisons, I certainly didn’t feel removed from the action. I was right there with her, seeing what Madame de Tourvel saw, feeling what she felt.
“It’s like you’re breathing together. The actor onstage is breathing with the audience, and we rely on each other for this feedback,” she said. “It’s a feeling that I can’t explain.”
Dangerous Liaisons runs until October 25 at the Stratford Festival. More information is available here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Amarah Hasham-Steele
Amarah Hasham-Steele is a current editorial fellow at The Walrus. She holds a masters in modern and contemporary literature from Trinity College Dublin, and her arts criticism has been published in Broadview and Intermission Magazine.
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