Charlbi Dean KRIEK - INTERVIEW #3
I have known Charlbi Dean since she was 14 and already a busy working woman. I have had the fortune to work with her over the years and was thrilled to be passing through the same city and to get the opportunity to interview her. Her Instagram bio says it all “You know they’s a kind of bird that don't have legs so it can't light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky?”. It’s an excerpt from “Orpheus Descending”, a play by Tennessee Williams*, and does well to describe the shape Charlbi Deans life has to it. I met with Charlbi at Molten Toffee, a little coffee shop on Kloof street in her home town of Cape Town. I have been following Charlbi’s career since the beginning and was already had ideas as to how the interview might go. I had photographed her as a model before but now was vastly more inquisitive about her blossoming acting career. The idea would be simple. One scene shot in a car. Charlbi’s character is coming from an experience prior to the scene that has heightened her emotion. She plays the emotion all the way through to conclusion in the car without a single line of dialogue. What better way to simply celebrate an actors skill. The video plays out in real time and is less a piece of entertainment and more of a Charlbi experience.
everybodys got to learn sometime
You might believe in the trope of the inspiration bearing muse or maybe more practically that ideas come from an accumulation of our life’s experiences, Regardless we can agree that there is something deep inside (or all around us) that, though hard to identify, fuels our creative offerings. I have had this theme recur for a while. The unbreakable relationship between happiness and sadness and although they are mutually exclusive their sameness is in their relative comparison. The scene with Charlbi was the perfect opportunity to put this across.
Charlbi on set for a fashion story we shot earlier in the year. Make up artist Kelly Paitaki
