Intern Sportlight: Nina Rosstalnyj

This month Nina Rosstalnyj, our new intern from the Central European University and participant of Bard College's BGIA program, writes about her connection to theatre and what brought her to Bond Street Theatre.

All my life I wanted to become an actress – not like many teenage girls who dream about Hollywood and life as a movie star. Rather, I wished to be a true artist who devotes her body and soul to expressing feelings and words that are not her own. I wanted to relay a message to the audience and make them feel something they didn’t expect, make them speak about something they didn’t even think of before, and change people’s view on the world for a slight moment when they are in the theatre.

I was part of theatre groups in high school, had the chance to accompany my dad who is an actor, and even played small roles in two movies myself. Two short internships with movie productions and countless theatre visits supposedly "prepared me for my mission to get into an acting school". After high school I started with the hearings at national academies which took me to eleven different schools in eight different cities in Austria and Germany within four months. Looking back this was an exciting time because I traveled alone so much - I could explore new cities, meet interesting new people that shared a dream with me and I felt so grown up after managing the whole process on my own. Luckily, I had great support from my family, and working together on the monologues brought me closer to my dad.

On the other hand, the pressure was immense. You only have a few moments to convince the jury, and the performance has to be perfect no matter how exhausted you are from hours of waiting until your name is called, and no matter how nervous you are after spending half of the day with other nervous people. After the performance, sometimes you see the jury sometimes you don’t, sometimes you choose which role to start with, sometimes they do, and the waiting begins anew. And then you get a simple ‘no’ without any further feedback; is it a ‘MY GOSH NOOOOO!’ or more a ‘no, but maybe next year’?

After too many ungraspable ‘no's’ I was so frustrated that I decided to do something totally different in my life, and to never even think about theatre again. It took me three years of studying political science in a new city, one internship at the German embassy in Ukraine and five months student's exchange in Romania to overcome my anger and unwillingness towards performing theatre myself. In my last undergraduate year, I participated in the University's theatre group and learned to appreciate it as a hobby, without all the pressure I put on myself before and, in the meantime, political activism and the theory behind it had become my new passion.

When planning my future and applying for a graduate degree, I didn't think of the possibility of combining the two worlds of theatre and the political, my two passions. You already guessed it: this is where Bond Street Theatre is showing me the perfect alliance between the arts and peacebuilding, acting and healing. Now, the naïve dreams of 'younger me' and the present 'political me' have come together.

I hope to be a valuable member of Bond Street Theatre as a communications associate focusing on Ukraine in that I will develop my own project in the country that I call my second home. I grew up in Germany with all the privileges that go with it. But in 2014 when the conflict in Ukraine broke out, and in 2015 many people fled war and sought refuge in Europe, I understood that these privileges only exist for a tiny fraction of people. Hopefully, I will have the chance to form part of a project that changes the situation of some individuals for the better, even if it is only small moments of joy, or confidence-building. After all, this is a wish I always had.