Biography
Rik Stowman is a dedicated actor, writer, singer/songwriter, musician and humanist. Trained in Stanislavski, Meisner, Method and Viewpoints, he has a deep love of the performing arts and considers them central to the human experience. He thrives best when he is tackling authentic and engaging work, owing his broad awareness of the world due to his parents of a multi-ethnic lineage.
Similarly Rik possesses a director’s deft and detailed eye for values-based theatre, particularly those which when placed within the legally complex If not larger context of indigenous history, can expose an individual’s tendency for both personal and systematic prejudices, flaws and interpretation of truth. Teaching his actors this very same sentiment, he therefore holds the arts as a vehicle, if not as a rustic impetus for moral change.
Based in Melbourne, Rik is a family man with a dash of the wanderlust and percipient eye for society’s fault lines. He believes in the fluidity and evolving journeyman’s process of discovery informing the true timbre of a performance-focused piece. All his works, particularly in his own plays and lyrics have tended to deal with man’s untapped potential to convert pain and robustness into those of beauty and immersive sources of strength and recovery.
Biography
Monroe Reimers is a seasoned actor, voiceover artist, teacher, newsreader and screenwriter who can quietly boast over thirty years of experience in the performance industry, going back to his 1979 feature film debut on “Hoodwink”, which was nominated eight times by the AFI Awards. As a NIDA graduate who has a pragmatic view on the three decades-long growth of the industry that he loves, his ambiguously portrayed ethnicity (whether it be Indian, Polynesian, Southern European, Hispanic or even Eurasian) often took a backseat to the authoritative yet gentle veracity of his talent. In fact, he has often played a doctor throughout his career.
Monroe takes a similar grip on the adventurous, semi-biographical, coming-of-age element in “Race the Sun” (1995) sharing the same space as Halle Berry, James Belushi, a young Eliza Dushku and Casey Affleck. He also has acted opposite local luminaries the likes of Jack Thompson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Judy Davis and Michael Caton. Based on J. M Coetzee’s novel, Monroe’s latest feature “Disgrace” (2008) was a significant sociopolitical piece on racism, rape and cavalier abuse of authority in post-apartheid South Africa with John Malkovich. He was on the right side of the law in “Better Man” (2013), integral to the outcome in the real-life case of Van Nguyen’s crime as a drug mule in Singapore. At times, he’ll go for more lighthearted fare, such as popular children’s TV series “Spellbinder”, “Time Trax” and “The Girl from Tomorrow” in the early to mid-90’s.
He also has brought his firm, savvy, dexterous and glossy gifts into theatre, notably having worked with Melbourne Theatre Company and NIDA. Indeed when you look at his works, this Sri Lankan-born Australian finds value in the ingenious, histrionic collaboration and zeitgeist-like filmmaking that is arguably ahead of the times.
As teacher, Monroe also has been able to pass his hard-won lessons onto actors of all levels, as well as those in the corporate and migrant world. Fifteen years as a Radio 2RPH and ABC Radio National newsreader has enabled him to specialise in developing voice and speech in the workplace and speaking English with a neutral accent, all the while never losing sight of ethnic self-identity.
Biography
Early in his career, Karim Zreika captured the attention of notable theatre critic and blogger Kevin Jackson. He elevated that the fast-talking lead’s ‘twinkle-eyed, twinkle-toed magnetism’ in The Voices Project production showed charismatic potential, only paralleled by his rough-hewn observatory vignettes for ‘gritty, everyday reality’.
Arguably one of the standouts in an AYTP (Australian Theatre for Young People) monologue, Karim philosophises the themes of belonging, identity and place in a refreshing, cheerful and energetic fashion: a paradoxical muddle of urbaneness and panache. In addition to his apparent passion for theatre and the screen, he is a dedicated musician whose skills in piano such as his signature “River Flows in You” are met with aplomb and technical deftness.
Since starting ICACM, Karim was introduced to the exciting industry starting with an Egyptian swashbuckling mystical fantasy adventure feature film “Gods of Egypt” in 2014. He was honoured to work with Hollywood and local mainstays Gerard Butler, Geoffrey Rush and director Alex Proyas respectively. That same year, he was co-lead in Curiousworks’ “Riz” set in Cabramatta. In 2015, he was cast as Bilal Folouk in the SBS four-part drama miniseries “The Principal” about the lives of difficult and troubled students in Sydney’s south-west, working closely with Alex Dimitriades.
Karim was next seen in the medical drama “Pulse” (2017); respective crime biographies “Deadly Women” (2017) and “Australian Gangster” (2018) and a small role in Stan’s high school drama “Year Of” (2023). For film, he was in the sci-fi action adventure feature film “Pacific Rim 2: Uprising” (2017) and drama feature film “Hearts and Bones” (2019), starring Hugo Weaving.