Luke
Ferrante
About
Luke is a freshman at Harvard where he plans to study Theater and Psychology. He recently graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy where he spent the last three years studying theater. Luke was most recently seen as Laertes in Interlochen's production of Hamlet, his last show at the academy. He spent his previous summer at The Muny in St. Louis for their production of Chess where he was a member of the ensemble and Muny Summer Intensive program. In March of 2023, Luke was a part of Interlochen's interdisciplinary and collaborative production, Mukti, which was performed at Lincoln Center. In addition to performing, he enjoys participating in the creative process of theater. He was able to experience this while devising Mukti for Lincoln Center over the course of six months in collaboration with his peers and faculty at Interlochen. While not performing, Luke loves boating with his family, wake surfing, hiking, playing cards, and streaming TV and movies on the couch with his dog, Jet.
"Somalia Dream" from Mukti at Lincoln Center
Al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent group seeking to seize control of ungoverned territory throughout Somalia, recruits (and in many cases abducts) children to join their ranks, brainwashing them into thinking they are serving a valiant cause for their country. This was the story I needed to tell.
I grappled with the idea that due to the circumstances of their birth, at least 7,000 young Somali children live this reality—one I was now attempting to render dramatically onstage in Mukti. How would I convey the disjunction between my lived experience and the act of inhabiting someone else’s trauma? Was it even responsible to try? I realized that in Mukti, we the actors had the obligation to foster awareness through art. I blocked out a dream sequence to entwine our disparate lives—actor and child soldier—before severing the connection and jolting the actors and audience back to reality. “Somalia Dream,” an original piece, was born: I collaborated for months with fellow actors to bring attention to a humanitarian crisis which, for many Americans, was just background noise on the nightly news.
The night of Mukti’s premiere, I took the stage in darkness before a Lincoln Center audience of 2,200 people. I hit my mark, lay down in my spotlight, and closed my eyes. The soundscape I’d woven together from among dozens of documentaries I’d studied began: an East African drum beat, a war siren, and an Al-Shabaab chant led by leader Mahad Karate. The three of us inhabiting the child soldiers woke up, startled by a war siren, our physicality and facial expressions modeled on the more than fifty images of child soldiers I’d pored over for inspiration. As Karate’s voice boomed from my soundscape—“Are we ready?”—we raised our fists and replied “Haa!” (yes), a raw, naïve bravery in the face of our imminent deaths. We performed slow-motion running in place at the front of the stage to convey the futility of escaping war, with the drumbeat steadily building as we increased our speed, still going nowhere. At the sound effect of a gunshot, I fell to the floor, paralyzed—until I awoke atop a soft pillow, safe on the polished, newly-renovated Lincoln Center stage.
