Pamela Leoni has been an actress for fourteen years, professionally graduated for four years in Scenic Arts by UNICAMP — a Brazilian university located in Campinas, São Paulo. She has worked on over fifteen plays as an actress and five as a director. During a talk about her work in the middle of a pandemic world, she went deep and poured her heart out about how hard it was to reinvent herself.
As everything started to go down, many artists went jobless. But the impact was bigger for those who worked with a live audience on theatres since they are used to interacting publicly at the same time they were up there doing their job. Having to contend with a phone’s camera and virtual connections ain’t easy. Staying at home and not putting all their love and compassion in movement along with their compromise with humanity and sanity as well.
Pamela said that at the beginning of 2020, she invested fifteen thousand reais (approximately 2.678 dollars) on a show’s production, and right before she even started to sell tickets for the play, Covid came and she had no idea when she would be able to work again and earn all that money back, since every single thing she was working on suddenly was interrupted, including her acting classes.
Stop working was not an option for her, even though she was completely in favour of staying home quarantining. So slowly, she created alternatives to keep working remotely, trying to touch other people at the same time. First, Pamela started working even more with her Instagram and YouTube channel. She was hired to do an artistic job with elder people over the phone and another one to tell stories over videos. And now she’s preparing herself to sell live streams of her latest kids show, VIDA GOTA, in October. And until the end of the year, she intends to adapt her clown show “A Vaqueira” to short videos for YouTube.
But the biggest and most impressive project she’s been working on since quarantine’s second month is called Teatro em Casa. It’s a monthly course that she produces and executes it on her own, where people create short scenes in their house and shoot them. She evaluates the scenes and instructs them on to the next one. The classes have approximately thirty students and it was a great opportunity to meet people from all around the country. Its differential is that it isn’t an online encounter, each one of them creates a scene whenever they can and send it to her. Anyone can participate, even the inexperienced people. And now, over one hundred people have adventured themselves with her during this quarantine.
When asked if it was getting hard for everyone to act, Pamela completely agreed, saying they don’t know when people will want to get together and watch live plays again. She doesn’t know what’s going to be like in the future, but knows that the cultural sector is living in crisis and many artists cannot do much. But there’s a rising movement of online plays and she’s enjoying watching them. And there are so many ways she finds interesting to keep with their jobs along with the online plays. She quoted short comedy videos, actors who do videos for Instagram through their stories, and the online classes that can allow people from anywhere in the country to tag along. It’s even more interesting to sell their acting jobs adapted to watch them at home. However, there was an even bigger challenge: to expand their public and effectively interfere in their daily life.
If you got interested in her work, you can check her Instagram to know more about some of the projects mentioned before (@cialaleoni). And if you got interested in her online acting classes, you can send her an e-mail and start this adventure. (laleonicia@gmail.com).
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Text edited by Yasmin Altaras
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