Rosemarie Kingfisher Class of 2017
Take a look at the spectacular work of our Theatre Arts & Dance Department alumni through our Alumni Spotlight series!
Sunday, September 13 at 7pm, Rosemarie will be featured in a virtual performance of The Imaginary Invalid by Moliere with the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, check it out!
The Sonoma State Theatre Department provided me with the most amazing foundation for creating opportunities for myself as an actor in the Bay Area. I felt absolutely lost in my junior year when graduation became more of a reality. I was a first generation Native American college student– I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I only knew that I had chosen an acting major to study for 4 years because I loved theatre. The Theatre Department held me through incredibly traumatic events that I was victim to at SSU. Person Theatre and Ives are where I felt safe; I am forever grateful for the faculty that continue to be mentors and support me in my career today.
Since graduating, my career has grown little by little each year. Every new experience contributes to my growth as a person, which in turn makes me a better actor. I dabbled in some community theatre and assistant teaching while I began to audition and integrate myself into the Bay Area theatre scene. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival became my first theatre home for about a year after college. I was cast in their 2018 outdoor summer production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the in their fall touring cast for the Comedy of Errors that toured all over California. At SSU I absolutely fell in love with Shakespeare and am so grateful to have found opportunities to immerse myself in it. The second theatre home I found was with Bay Area Children’s Theatre. Our own Doyle Ott suggested I audition for them– it was handy that the new show they were trying to cast needed a female clown. I was cast in their 2018/19 acting company and performed in three shows for them.
A most wonderful part of an artist's career is the people you meet. I like to soak up everything I can learn from other actors around me. I learned about an incredible program in Massachusetts, called Shakespeare and Co. and I went to study in their month-long Actor Training Program in January of 2019. I learned more about myself and Shakespeare and my voice and my body than I think I could anywhere else. I couldn’t recommend their training enough to ANYONE, especially actors... especially actors who love Shakespeare. With my circus skills background I learned about the San Francisco Circus Center and their 7-month Clown Training Program which I just finished up this spring. I am so grateful for the clown community and what it has taught me and how it supports me as an actor.
Now, faced with COVID-19, I along with all the artists who I have met over the years have to work just that much harder to find our next job. I have been extremely lucky to find online performance work during shelter-in-place. It’s hard, it is just barely what we want to be doing and yet it is all we can do. I have done a virtual new-play written by local playwrights from Same Boat Theatre Collective addressing our current social and environmental climates. We are all acting with green screens as our backgrounds in Zoom and I just finished a radio-style version of Romeo and Juliet with Lake County Theatre Co. where only our voices were heard. My next performance is as Angelique in An Imaginary Invalid with the Actors ensemble of Berkeley, Zoom style.
I am inspired by work that is questioning the status quo. The american theatre must change along with everything else, and we artists have so much power, we need to make sure we do better for those who don’t have a stage or a screen to speak to the world from. I hope to attend grad-school one day and learn how to use my voice in theatre in bigger ways. One day I see myself directing, maybe in my own outdoor theatre company. Until then, my career continues to grow, as do I.