Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Angela Maria Parra Toledo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Angela Maria, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I think that as long as you are still showing up for yourself, you’ll definitely learn, maybe what works and what doesn’t. How your instrument responds and reacts. Which are your strengths and your weaknesses? I like to think as if we were scientists with our own art. You just got to keep exploring, finding constantly different ways and perspectives. Our body is different every day; work with that difference and take it as an advantage.
Talking about how I could speed up the process. I personally appreciate the timing. The one that we all have, I’m not fully sure if there’s a need for speeding things up. I just try as much as I can to make it juicy and enjoyable. Of course I have my insecurities, and sometimes I would like to get everywhere faster. Which is why I try my best to remember myself; what you are living now is priceless.
Some great skills to have are definitely emotional intelligence, having discipline as much as you can, organization, and perseverance. Balance them with having the flexibility that things can turn out in a different way, because of the thousand things that are out of our control. Finally, an obstacle that stood in my way and still shows up from time to time, just on a different scales, is that I tend to exhaust myself; I don’t know how to stop or find resting times. I’m looking forward to taking care of myself and having more self-awareness.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
A good summary of who I am would be, in three words, a character actress. I really love to connect with my body and portrait, different kind of roles. I started my career studying piano, and then I moved forward with Musical Theater in Lima and In Argentina, both experiences made me realized that one of the things that I like the most is to express myself with my art. It is a wonderful way of communicating. And always thought that whenever I’m portraying a new character, I approach the process with respect and honor like if they were real, but not in this physical dimension, and I’m allowing them to pass through my body in order to communicate what they need to say. The goal of my life is making this world a better place, so I choose jobs that are related with that. We can say, that most of the characters that I’ve ever played are related to the idea of hope. My differential benefit or what people remember of me mostly is the energy that I bring to work, I always unconsciously, try to see every situation from different angles and points of view, even though they can look bad, I tried to see it as opportunities rather than problems. Apart from my artistic career, yoga instructor. I found a lot of serenity and ground. Whenever I’m doing this practice I found a lot of self-care, self-awareness, a moment to honor myself and everyday I look forward to a better lovely way to navigate life.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Even though I have had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life since I was very little, I also had my doubts at a very specific moment in the world’s history. During the COVID years, when we were all locked up, I had big doubts about my career. How would acting be meaningful in this context. I understood that humanity needed to connect with themselves and their emotions, they needed faith. But, at the same time, we were all more concerned about our principal needs, such as food and health. Heath! is funny to think about because my gut knows that many of the diseases that we get start with a low immune system, which literally goes down when we get stressed or depressed. But in reality, we just don’t give as much mindfulness, time or priority as we should. Coming back to the question, During that time I opened the door to the fun world of Publicity. I think it was a very helpful tool for my career, and I do encourage performers to enrich their careers with other ones that may help you have a more successful business in general, of course, as long as you have the time and money. But, if you ever have the time to maybe read some books or just get more information, please do.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I have two different points of view on this question, one goes regardless of my experience with myself, a little more selfish perspective. I do love to live, feel and experiment with different extreme scenarios. Likewise, I mean, who has the chance to fall in love every day like if it were the very first time? What a privilege! This is just one tiny example of how I feel very grateful for my career. You literally live in the most random, magical, crazy, and unreal situations. They seemed to bring you out of reality, but at the end, I think that is what humanity is. Is visceral, intense, and messy. We don’t get to experience everything in one life, though. But as an actor, you can portray many of these intense moments in life. From the perspective of the results that I see in people with my work, I said this before, but really the reason why I do all of this is because of the messages, the transformation, and the effect that art can have on so many souls. Sometimes it goes beyond the rational explanation. It goes directly to your soul, and those are the sorts of things you can see in people’s eyes or just in their physical behavior.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Angelaparra.art
- Instagram: @angelaparraaa
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/angela.parra.77
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@angelaparra6250?feature=shared
