This week I spoke with Amanda Sum to talk about her roles as a soccer-playing teen, a local cricket star and the upcoming recording and release of her original music.

Growing up, Amanda says that while “performance was always kind of around,” she didn’t decide to pursue this lifestyle until the end of high school. Throughout her five years there, she found herself in band and choir classes but wanted to explore music outside of these domains. After teaching herself to play the guitar, she shared some covers singing on Youtube. However, let it be known that the catalyst behind her channel “was not for self-growth, it was for me to try to impress my grade 10 crush”. I am in no position to judge, none of my attempts to impress love interests have resulted in any tangible skills. While this strategy ultimately didn’t work, she still finds value in it and “leave[s] up old embarrassing videos just to keep humble”. Despite all of these involvements and other creative endeavours, Amanda’s decision to study theatre in university largely came through the elimination of other options. She says that unlike classic origin stories, “I wasn’t blessed with knowing” that this career lay ahead.

Crickets & Wolves: Fitness in the Theatre

While attending Simon Fraser University, she received tutelage from Maiko Yamamoto and James Long, the co-founders of the experimental theatre company, Theatre Replacement. Amanda struck up friendships with both of them outside of class and even interned at their Pantoland children’s summer camp. She had many roles there, serving as someone who “tamed kids tantrums” as well as serving as someone who served lunch at noon. Last year, Amanda earned a role in East Van Panto, one of the most well-known installations from Theatre Replacement. Donning a plaid blazer with an extra set of arms, she played “Jiminy Pattison,” the Jiminy Cricket/Jim Pattison hybrid in their take on an East Vancouver Pinocchio. After three weeks of rehearsal, she embarked on a performance schedule of eight shows a week over a total of seven weeks. In addition to this commitment, she was arranging music for a project that I’ll touch on later, along with finishing her final classes at SFU. Amanda describes this workload as both a physical and mental marathon but adds that she learned a lot from this experience and was also “the most fit I’ve ever been”.

Before her time in East Van Panto, Amanda earned a role in a stage production of The Wolves, not once but twice. In the initial run (2017), she saw a casting call for nine teenage girls, a demographic that she obviously had some experience in. However, the more unfamiliar territory was that all of these girls were members of the same soccer team. Pushing any inhibitions aside, Amanda thought “I’m so bad at sports, but how fun would it be to act like I’m good at sports?”. After a crash-course on dribbling, she got the part and completed a successful, albeit unpaid four-day run. But due to the positive reviews of the cast’s performance, the show was picked up for a larger, paid, remount for the following year. Amanda said that receiving news of this was both very exciting and validating as their passion project was garnering appreciation on a larger scale. Unfortunately, as rehearsals began for the remount, and Amanda returned to the physical nature of the role, she developed a nerve issue in her foot. She says that “I woke up one day, and I thought my foot was asleep, but then it never went away”. In the spirit of athletic perseverance and something about a show going on, she pushed through without any major incidents right up to the preview, the first night with an audience.

During the preview and midway through a scene in which the cast was doing some warmup exercises, Amanda tripped and was unable to catch herself due to the numbness in her foot. She suffered a sprained ankle with half a show to go. She still had lines, so leaving the stage wasn’t the optimal solution, but neither was changing the tight blocking she had with the rest of the cast. Without many other options, she says that “it was such a team effort” to adapt as she stayed seated for the rest of the show. One small silver lining was that since her character was concussed and “always kind of out of it a bit,” the audience proved never the wiser to her static nature in the second half. However, due to her injury, Amanda was unable to return for the entire four-week run of the remount. While she initially felt “devastated” at this prospect, she was extremely proud to see the camaraderie between her understudy, her original castmates and the new team members over the successful run.

Artistic Integrity

Over the last year, Amanda has shifted focus towards her music and has been awarded grants to record and release some singles with her band later this year. While “music was always something that was like a hobby,” she found herself integrating her music more and more into her work in the theatre. She makes the distinction that she isn’t very interested in performing in traditional musical theatre, rather that she is interested in how music and theatre can intersect “without being a flashy thing”. ***jazz hands***

Due to COVID-19, her original recording date in April has been moved to July. Amongst obvious difficulties rescheduling recording time, this shift also jeopardized her dream of having an all-Asian female band. Since she was in a position to curate her own team, she wanted to collaborate with individuals who share similar experiences and values to those influencing her music. But due to the rescheduling, her guitarist was no longer available to record. To fill this need and stay on schedule, Amanda was sent a list of session guitarists; all of whom were White men. She felt that bringing one of these guitarists in for the sake of staying on schedule would be “rubbing directly against the value[s]” at the core of the project itself. Instead of accepting this as an inevitability, she rewrote the guitar arrangements to be played on a synth and is excited to have hired a new musician to join her team. This solution required much more work to rewrite and rearrange the parts, but she is “happy to do the work to make both process and product something I can stand by”.

Expanding on this ideology, Amanda derived these principles of artistic integrity from her experience in the theatre. She said that she has no desire to make generic pop songs, and wants to tell stories that are important to her. The personal aspect of this project is also unique in that “this has been the first time where I feel complete agency” in the work. In theatre, she is generally “some sort of vessel for someone else,” whereas now she is bringing her own stories, inspiration and team together to create an original product. Speaking about her body of work as a whole, she says that as a theatre artist and musician she is constantly confronting societal norms that do not necessarily line up with her own perspectives or experiences. However, she sees opportunity in polarity, and says that “when I don’t match up with these norms, that’s even more exciting”. Hell yes.

For more, follow Amanda on Instagram for updates, content, “and other performance-related antics”. If you went to high school with Amanda and would like a do-over, I’ll also link to her Youtube channel. Stay tuned for her singles later this year, but in the meantime check out New Societies, an interactive theatre game that can now be enjoyed online at 7pm on June 25th.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for bonus content on Amanda and more!

If you missed last week, check out my interview with filmmaker, Corim de Guzman,

-BF