Alumni create web series about love, the acting industry

A new romantic comedy series, “Kat Loves LA,” is available on YouTube starring four University of California alumni. Since December, with the exception of the two holiday weekends, episodes have been released every Sunday for viewers to freely watch. The creator and producer of the show, Paget Kagy, is a UC Berkeley alumna. She also plays the character Kat Park whom the audience follows throughout the show. After speaking with Kagy; Ilana Guralnik, a UC Davis alumna who plays Kat’s good friend; Natasha Averin and David Marciano, the show’s director, their passion was obvious. Their collective dedication to both the project and their crafts were clear.

Something immediately noticeable about the series is its diverse cast compared to others in the entertainment industry. The industry is slowly but surely making its way toward being more representative; individuals like Kagy demonstrate that it might be up to minorities to take the reigns in order to speed up the process.

“Diverse casting was important to me because I wanted to create a multi-dimensional world,” Kagy said. “When you have an all-White cast or an all-Asian cast, etc., it misses the textures and dynamics in real life that I think viewers are naturally interested in exploring. It also gave us a chance to highlight the multicultural aspect of Los Angeles that informs how being a minority in a predominantly White culture affects racial identity.”

Yet she wanted to make sure the show was relatable to viewers from all backgrounds.

“I also hope that this series will prove that it’s possible to make content led by Asian Americans that people from all cultural backgrounds can relate to and engage with. […] My hope was that the challenges the main characters were going through around identity and feeling out of place were universal enough that it wouldn’t resonate as a specifically Korean American issue,” Kagy said.

The show is Kagy’s creation, which she holds very dearly — as Kagy says it, a lot of “heart and soul” was put in. Marciano describes Kagy as “a dream” to work with.

“Paget is an easygoing, intelligent quick learner who is open to what is best for the project,” Marciano said in an email interview. “These are qualities that you don’t often find in a creative who has written a project for themselves to star in. We also have the same sensibility when it comes to taking the material from the page to the stage. We get each other.”

It seems that getting to work with Kagy and the rest of the team was helpful, particularly because it was a show Marciano felt positive about from the start — and especially since this was his first directorial experience after having taken the acting route for more than 30 years.

“I didn’t know how much I would have loved/enjoyed directing,” Marciano said. “More than I can imagine. It’s impacted my life. It has opened the door to a new form of creativity for me. I now know I am a good director. That I can do this, and I can do it well.”

When asked what he hopes comes from this series, his constructive time spent on “Kat Loves LA” led him to end on an inspiring note about following what you are passionate about.

“I hope this project opens the eyes of those who hold the key, for all involved, to start making our livings at what we love to do,” Marciano said. “Most of us have other jobs or are making just enough money to get by each month. I hope we all start to be valued more for what we do.”

At the age of 17, Guralnik started dealing with having this passion for acting while trying to compromise on what her family thought was best. She ended up agreeing to have a back-up plan, getting a degree in a “non-entertainment-related” field at UC Davis in exchange for being able to move to LA after graduating. Guralnik choose a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a masters in communication, and was able to complete both by the young age of 22.

“Attending UC Davis gave me business skills and knowledge that I later used to pursue the industry in Los Angeles,” Guralnik said. “I also learned to study and memorize very quickly and absorb material easily, which helped me greatly in my craft. ​I ​took ​all the acting classes and drama-related classes available at the school as electives (not as a major), and it gave me a chance to learn and be active in my field while getting an education and a degree.”

Her advice for students trying to get into the entertainment industry? Be sure of yourself, what your aspirations are and how essential they are to where you see your future heading.

“The industry (as in the business side, not the craft) is extremely difficult and cutthroat,” Guralnik said. “Be 100% sure that this is your passion and you cannot be happy doing anything else. If you can, do that instead, as your life will be easier. But if you cannot live without your passion (which I fully understand, as that is how I am) then go for it with everything you have, and keep that unwavering determination at your core as everybody inside and outside of the industry will try to shake you off of it. Study hard, and apply your learning skills throughout your continuing classes that hone your talent and apply them to your pursuit of the business.”
On what drew her into the show “Kat Loves LA,” Guralnik praised the writing and noted Kagy’s “perfect blend of freedom and direction.”

“100% what drew me in to the web series was the writing,” Guralnik said. “It makes an actor’s job a million times easier when something is well written. I was blown away when I read the script, the subtlety and humor is so perfectly woven into the story. I loved working with Paget. There was more pressure to get her vision right, but it is also more of a gift when the writer is on set as it becomes easier to achieve that.”

Guralnik looks back on her time at Davis with fondness, noting that her degree remains helpful even as an actress pursuing a different field.

“Looking back on the beginning years of my career, people regularly ask me if I wish that I would have skipped college to start pursuing acting earlier,” Guralnik said. “While extra years are potentially helpful, as time always is, I don’t regret my education for a second. I loved the time I spent at UC Davis.”

Written by: Cecilia Morales — arts@theaggie.org

The value of art in the classroom

This is the second installment of a two-part story about the arts curriculum and funding in the Davis Joint Unified School District. Read the first part here.

Because teachers value art in their classrooms but are limited by the number of art programs, art must be incorporated into other subjects.

“There are things we have to do, but we have a lot of flexibility,” said Gigi Bugsch, a third grade teacher at Cesar Chavez Elementary. “We have times where we have guided reading, and we have to do it at a certain time and make sure we have the minutes of math in. We can weave the art and the cooking and the crafts in throughout the day as long as we are making our minutes required for different subjects.”

With the large amount of curriculum expected to be covered in elementary schools, this integration is a main way for arts to continue its presence.

“The curriculum for 6th grade on is enormous, so for me I find that most all my art is worked into something else other than art,” said Marla Cook, a 6th grade teacher at Robert E. Willet Elementary. “This is my 29th year, so probably for my first 10 or 15 years I always had art […] but now we have so many demands on us having a regular time does not work.”

For Cook, the embedded nature of art is best displayed in social studies, where art naturally arises in the material that is covered.

“In 6th grade we teach ancient history and there is so much art during that time that we can do it when we are studying social studies. I think the best thing about doing art through social studies is that we put it in more context. Mosaics were discovered in Mesopotamia, so we will create mosaics when learning about that. I used to do it with real tiles, but that became cost-prohibitive, so now we do them with paper […] We also do art in math with tessellations, for example.”

This extensive curriculum stems in part from Common Core standards, the educational initiative to establish a consistent nationwide curriculum.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like Common Core,” Bugsch said. “I like it because it feels like it is more challenging. The only thing that is impeding arts in education is the amount of meetings we have to go to because of it. I can weave art in here. I can weave technology in here. You just need to give me the educator unstructured time to think about what I want to do and how I want to do it. The lack of confidence that administrators have in educators is what is impeding art. The district office or those at the state level, those people who are making plans for us, don’t know what we have to do or what hurdles we have to go through on a day-to-day basis.”

Indeed, such structure outside the classroom can mirror how the teacher will teach in the classroom. A lack of time to be creative behind the scenes dictates the level of ingenuity a classroom activity will entail.

“If our time outside of the classroom is always so structured that is only going to teach us to be more structured with the kids,” Bugsch said. “If you’re stubborn like me, that doesn’t get in the way, but if you’re new [at teaching] and if you want to stay in a particular district, you’re going to follow what they tell you. I think that is what’s going to be difficult in the future: when you have structured meetings and structured things for teachers outside of the classroom, you are going to mold a teacher who favors structure. And structure does not favor art.”

For Cook, the problem is not Common Core in itself or what it aims to teach, but rather the structure in how material is taught and what lessens the availability of art in the classroom.

The current educational trend of high-stakes testing similarly inhibits arts within the classroom.

“There has been a narrowing of curriculum that has happened over a number of years,” said Steven Athanases, a professor at the UC Davis School of Education. “In the last 15 years, big accountability contexts, high-stakes testing and the No Child Left Behind push in many ways yielded this testing mania. There is generally a pattern in which teachers are denied the opportunity to be innovators, and there is the expectation that they will follow a curriculum that is scripted.”

With these current programs and educational trends, the prospect of teaching art exclusively, its principles and techniques alike, and not in the context of other subjects, diminishes.

“The way I have been talking about the arts so far, some might say it is instrumentalist in nature,” Athanases said. “It’s using the arts so they can learn content better and express themselves better. There are also some who say that we need to teach art for art’s sake. When you study or are involved in art what does that yield? And some folks have theorized about problem-solving; that is, [when] you are making a painting you need to solve problems about what is going to be my focus, what colors and textures and materials am I going to use.”

Cook, however, argues that this more embedded instruction might be a more organic way of instilling art in education. Requiring students to take an art class might produce projects that yield the same outcomes — every student ends up drawing a version of the same flower. Such art of an embedded, informal nature might be the best method to express creative thinking, the true essence of art.

Nonetheless, in whatever form it takes, art instruction itself can hold value in educational settings.

“I can say there clearly have been many documents written about the multiple ways arts can be explored from kindergarten all the way up,” Athanases said. “Art as its own curriculum or to extend into other forms of academic content — there is value in all of those.”

One such value is its ability to aid a teacher in conveying information while still abiding by the curriculum and fundamental standards they are required to teach.

“I used to show pictures to students and ask ‘What do you think this author wanted you to get out of this?’” Cook said. “Students would say ‘Don’t you mean artist?’ ‘No, I mean author because it’s something they created and had a message they wanted to get across to you.’ I would show them a picture, and we would talk about the colors and what do you think the author would want to take away from it. It was all about reading, but reading a picture.”

The instructional design of teaching literature concepts without using a book aids students in learning to go deeper with the material, according to Athanases, ridding students of “dry curriculum” in favor of “emotional contours and texture.”

In the same vein, Cook spoke of an activity she did with her students to demonstrate this concept: comparing two pictures with her students and the message each was trying to convey.

“When I did this activity and asked if students wanted to make a comment, I had 27 out of my 29 students raise their hand,” Cook said. “That particular lesson intrigued them, it was interesting. How many times can you ask a question and have that many kids have something to say?”

Going deeper is not the only motive to apply art within learning, but the ability for it to engage a multitude of students. Art can appeal to the different learning styles of various students, those who are kinesthetic or visual learners, for example.

“Kids may not take in information the way that you do,” Cook said. “There is not one way to deliver what you have to say and take it in. And many students in here would rather draw pictures than take notes. And it’s not that they want to be an artist, but that’s how they think […] art has to be part of it because that’s how so many people learn.”

More fundamentally, art aids memory and understanding of complicated ideas, according to Athanases. In addition, the genuine creativity that is required from art is an essential skill for students to acquire.

“We’re hearing a lot from the tech world and corporate world of other kinds that folks who are graduating with college degrees and also those without degrees, that they don’t understand the nature of innovation and creativity,” Anthanases said. “There is a cookie-cutter way that they are graduating and entering the workforce, so many are calling for innovation and creative thinking. And the arts can really fuel that. When we value the making of something, whether it is something visual or performance or communicative art, it can promote the idea that success is often dependent on thinking creatively and out of the box.”

Not only does art have long-term impacts, but it also directly impacts the work students do in elementary schools. Bugsch noticed the direct implications a knitting project had on her students. Not only did the students want to make beanies with pom-poms on the top, but their cursive handwriting improved by fostering strong fine motor skills.

For parent Ashley Muir Bruhn, whose son attends first grade at Cesar Chavez Elementary, the skills her child learns through art make it an important aspect of her child’s education.

“When kids are encouraged to express themselves and create their own art, they develop a sense of innovation that will be important throughout their lives,” Muir Bruhn said. “Making art requires decision-making, helps with motor skills, an acceptance of mistakes and sets the stage for the kind of visual learning we all use daily. I think it’s crucial to a well-rounded education.”

The question of the future status of arts in California elementary education still remains how to balance resources, how to allocate funds effectively. For Athanases, in order to fully comprehend the value of arts in education, more empirical research needs to be conducted and properly conveyed to the public, those developing curriculum and those in the policy position.

“I think folks who are in decision-making positions need to be aware of the 21st-century individual and the increasingly diverse context that folks are really engaging in,” Athanases said. “I think that conventional ideas about schooling are no doubt part of the function of what occurs, and then art gets cast as fluff and cute. It is incumbent upon educators and researchers to do the work of demonstrating the linkages between art forms and other forms of academic learning.”

Until then, the future of arts education in the Davis Joint Unified School District is in the fiscal hands of the state, allocation decisions of the district and the instructional discretion of the teachers. Bugsh’s and Cook’s students, respectively, will be making beanies and Mesopotamian mosaics in the meantime.

Written by: Caroline Rutten — arts@theaggie.org

A film not only journalists will enjoy

“The Post,” a film about a strong woman in a sea of men making a name for herself, shows a trope very fitting with society today. It is a vital American story that needs to be told, not only for women standing up for themselves, but to remind our country of the importance of the freedom of press.

“The Post” is filled with a star-studded cast: Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, the socialite publisher of The Washington Post, and Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the paper’s executive editor who wants to shake up the news scene. Streep has an outstanding performance and nails her character with elegance. Steven Spielberg as the director means it’s sure to get at least one nomination.

The film centers around the leakage of the Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post’s decision to publish the papers. The story begins with The New York Times publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers and then being court-ordered to stop publishing. This was a turning point in American history, a time when the government was putting restrictions on the freedom of the press. Once that happened, The Washington Post decided to join in and start publishing the portions they had, leading them to be involved in the court case. This was a big step for the Washington Post — going from a local paper to a national one.

All of the events taking place in the film happened rather quickly, which was exceptionally portrayed through rhythms and camera movements. For a journalistic movie to work well, it must be fast-paced to demonstrate intensity — and this movie accomplished that.

The cinematography is incredible. The images of the printers and all the writers clacking away on their typewriters made me feel that being a journalist is a noble work to be taking part in. I noticed in every scene how much time was spent on getting all the small details correct, transporting me back a couple decades.

Streep’s character not only won over all the men trying to tear her down, she helped start a revolution. It was fulfilling to watch newspapers across the country showing solidarity for the risky move.  

The film reminds viewers that the press cannot accept restrictions because by doing so it opens itself to losing its freedom. Filmmaker Spielberg makes this film feel more like a wake-up call to our country than a film about our history.

Written by: CaraJoy Kleinrock — arts@theaggie.org