In his 1999 provocation, True and False: Common Sense and Heresy for the Actor, David Mamet asserts, “most teachers of acting are frauds, and their schools offer nothing other than the right to consider oneself part of the theatre… Formal education for the player is not only useless, but hurtful,” says Mamet. “It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience.”
Let me be clear, while I believe Mamet’s edicts to be wonderful conversation starters they are limited in their worth, not to mention hypocritical—he is himself an acting teacher.
Theatre schools are indeed strange places, seemingly full of contradiction. They are almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t attended one. At my earliest (and unsuccessful) audition for a prominent Toronto theatre school, I and the other nervous applicants were treated to a half hour lecture on why we shouldn’t go to school for acting. Perhaps this was an attempt to weed out those who didn’t have the conviction or depth of character required to survive three years of physical and emotional turmoil.
Theatre schools, not unlike some other training programs for highly competitive fields, seem to have adopted the baptism by fire approach. If you can survive it, you can survive anything, with the exception, perhaps, of a career in acting.
When I was finally, after several attempts, accepted into a three-year program, it was explained to my class that our “journey” would be structured more or less in three parts.
First year we would be pulled apart, literally and figuratively. All of our preconceptions about the craft would be exposed to the light of day, all of our “blocks” opened, both physically and mentally. Much of this, “opening” would occur while lying prostrate on a studio floor. We would, we were warned, find this process both painful and confusing.
During second year we would slowly and carefully be pulled from the floor and put back together, so that we could hit the stage on our feet in final year, which would consist primarily of full scale productions.
I suppose, beyond sounding slightly cultish, if it worked it would all be worth in the end.
Six years after graduating I look back at my theatre school experience with a mixture of emotion, which ranges from sweet nostalgia to blinding rage. But when I take a deep breath and the feeling passes I start to wonder.
Do theatre schools in all their various contemporary forms serve young aspiring actors well?
My guess is that the answer to that question depends on individual experience. What school, what teachers, what students etc. And there is no doubt, that from school to school, while there are often great similarities, there are also vast differences in styles, methods, approaches and philosophies.
And so it is in the spirit of genuine open-minded investigation that I will begin a series of conversations here on the Praxis website, called Exit Interviews. I will talk to former theatre school attendees, graduates, non-graduates, as well as former students who are now teachers, from a variety of schools across Canada and North America. My hope is to broaden our understanding of the contemporary theatre school, its strengths and weaknesses, through the honest reflection of those who survived it. Stay tuned!
If you attended theatre school and would like to weigh in on this conversation, please leave us your comments below or send us an email to info@praxistheatre.com. I look forward to the debate!
I am sitting in the back room of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival Hub at 91 King Street West in Kitchener. The festival staff is all in the same room for the first time since the launch in March. Ken Cameron and Naomi Campbell arrived last night, as did Christian Barry with the Homage crew, and Kris Nelson (Encounters Series) was the last to arrive today after touring with Ame Henderson and Public Recordings in Europe, and a fly-by to his apartment in Montreal. (Ame will be part of Who’s Afraid of Academia? in the Heritage Room at Kitchener City Hall, talking about her recent foray back to school.) Marion Sharp and Richard Ellis also arrived today with suitcases, safari-style hats ,and a camera slung around Richard’s neck – these two volunteers have been with the festival since the beginning, volunteering in their home town of Ottawa and traveling each year to the festival’s new host city; there is an award named after them now.
So it’s official. We have about 51 hours until Mump & Smoot Cracked kicks off the festival, and we are trying to see each other over the boxes piling up around our desks.
I wanted to write something to shed some light on what Magnetic North is all about. Although I imagine that most of you have at least heard of the festival, I’ll give you the low-down. First of all, this year it’s in Kitchener-Waterloo, about an hour from Toronto (check out the info below for details about how you can take a bus to and from Toronto to the festival on June 14, 15 and 16). It’s a festival of contemporary Canadian theatre in English. It happens in Ottawa every second year and in the years in between the whole operation picks up and moves to a different Canadian centre. It serves a couple of important purposes – it puts the host city in the national spotlight, and each year casts the net further and further to build a network for artists and presenters to move work around the country and to get Canadian work out into the world. It’s the only festival of its kind in Canada. Over the years Brooke Johnson’s Trudeau Stories, Lauchie, Liza and Rory (Mulgrave Road), Fear of Flight (Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland), April 14, 1912 (Theatre Rusticle), So Many Doors (Sour Brides), The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (November Theatre) and Nevermore (Catalyst Theatre) are some of the productions that have toured, nationally and internationally, in part because of their exposure and the connections they made at Magnetic North.
So this year, there are 10 shows from across Canada in the festival which opens on June 9: Mump & Smoot’s Cracked, Norman (Lemieux Pilon 4D Art), Homage (2b theatre company), The Last 15 Seconds (The MT Space), Elephant Wake (Globe Theatre), The Greatest Cities in the World (Theatre Replacement), Another Home Invasion (Tarragon Theatre), Dedicated to the Revolutions (Small Wooden Shoe), Monster Makers and Children’s Choice Awards (Mammalian Diving Reflex). To see all the details, go here.
There are lots of other events, happenings and performances as part Magnetic Encounters – which brings the audience really close to the work through direct interactions with the artists. And the festival is also a meeting ground for artists, presenters and other culture workers to discuss the relevant ideas and issues of the moment. This year, there are over 60 presenters, and we expect almost 250 delegates to take part in the Industry Series altogether. We’re going to be talking about touring, education, presenting, agency. We’re also going to host a panel discussion with Their Excellencies The Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, and M. Jean-Daniel Lafond. You can check out the full Industry Series schedule here.
It’s really exciting to be here in Kitchener-Waterloo; not only am I staying in the guest room at my parent’s place, and my mom wakes me up in the morning and makes me oatmeal with almond milk and berries, but I’m working downtown where I spent most of my teenage years – and can see the slow shifts that are happening in this town as the high tech industries and universities move into the abandoned factories that once made shoes, buttons and furniture. As kids we said that there was something in the water in Kitchener (a little less perhaps in our slightly more sophisticated better half, Waterloo). I realize now that it’s a magnet actually. It’s a force that brings people back, or together. Fitting I suppose that Magnetic North is here. I’m surprised how excited I am to bring the country into this place with all its quirks and characters.
Anyway, I’ll be here. Come find me and I’ll tell you where to meet new friends, where to walk at one in the morning to see the stars, and where you’ll find the best dim sum in Ontario. And I’ll see you around the festival of course. I’ll be one of the lunatics ever smiling…
For June 14, 15 and 16 Toronto arts practitioners can buy a one-day special for $100. It includes the bus from Toronto to K-W and back, access to the day’s Industry Series programming and tickets for two shows. SPILL Feast is extra. All reservations must be made in advance through Gayle Diguer at GDiguer@nac-cna.ca or 1-519-772-3783.
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Donna-Michelle St. Bernard onstage with Belladonna and the Awakening at Toronto Rape Crisis benefit
by Lindsay Schwietz
In December I wrote about the lack of women in artistic leadership positions in theatre in Canada. With women holding only around 30% of playwright, artistic director and director positions in PACT theatres – in general, the larger the theatre company the less the women – I was upset. There is such an enormous amount of women in Canada training in the arts, believing in their craft and working hard to make a career in theatre, and it is difficult for me to accept that the opportunities are not there to develop their art. I was disheartened until I decided to sit down with some of the women who are in that 30% in Toronto. What are those women’s experiences working in theatre? What do they believe about the status of women? What are their views on feminism as it relates to their work as artists?
I chose to interview four women in Toronto who are successful in both the independent theatre scene and in some of the larger theatres. They are playwrights, directors, performers, artistic directors, and general managers. They have all chosen to create their own work for various reasons. They are all strong women who believe in what they do and work hard to achieve their goals. They are: Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, Erin Shields, Beatriz Pizano and Kelly Straughan.
Donna Michelle-St Bernard
Because of the stigma attached to the word, women being quiet about their feminist views seems to be a trend in Toronto at the moment. Not for Donna-Michelle St. Bernard. “What happened to ‘Hear Me Roar’?” St. Bernard says. She is a feminist and proud of it. “I’m holding on to the word – I’m not letting it go.” St. Bernard is a playwright, emcee, and the general manager of Native Earth Performing Arts. Working on her goal to write a 54-play series – one play for every country in Africa – and a physical ‘monument of women’ which is still in the conceptual phase, she is focusing on doing more work for women.
When the PACT report came out, she was most interested in the high number of women in administrative roles versus the low amount in artistic roles. She wondered whether many women chose the administrative work when the opportunities were lacking to use their artistic side. “It calls to mind the number of women who work in arts administration who feel stigmatized by their administrative practice and feel it harder to break through the perception of them as administrators to be artists,” St. Bernard says. “For me my practice is a whole person practice. People like to treat my administrative brain and my artistic brain as separate entities, but I’m a whole person.”
Dienye Waboso and Nawa Nicole in Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls.
Now that the independent theatre scene in Toronto is thriving, more women are able to use both sides of their skills. “You have all these women who have a quiet artistic practice, who’ve now bolstered up their administrative capacities. I feel that is the root of all these independent companies being started by women. ‘I have this skill and I have this skill’,” says St. Bernard. “In theory, in the past it wasn’t that easy or conventional to just start a company to do your work.”
“We need to start validating and valuing independent work done by women because at this moment, independent theatre is our territory,” she says. “The environment is ripe for all these independent companies – for one-off shows. And it’s not just that we can do them. It’s the fact that the press will review a show by a company they’ve never heard of, and the professional community will come out and see what we’re doing even if it didn’t come up through their ranks. In that way I feel really positive about the empowerment of women in the arts.”
In her own work, St. Bernard is completely content with what she is doing and how she is doing it. “The theatre I make happens where I want it to happen in the way I want it to happen. I’m perfectly satisfied. And I’m successful by my definition, in the work that I’m putting out, who’s coming to see it and what the response is to it.” She measures her own success her own way, and does not need the larger theatre houses to validate her. That being said, St. Bernard is conflicted; it still angers her that there is not more artistic work for women in the big theatres. She isn’t producing work at the big theatres because she feels they are not a good fit for one another, but she wishes that were more of a choice rather than something imposed on her and many other women. “I don’t want to be there. But I don’t want to not be there because I’m not wanted there.”
Despite this conflict, what is really important for St. Bernard is being able to do her work and speak up for women’s rights. “Those of us who have the capacity to have voice have the responsibility to carry voice,” she says.
Erin Sheilds and Maev Beaty in Montparnasse
Erin Shields
“In my theatre program there were maybe 70% women and 30% men, but we were doing Shakespeare and Chekhov and all these plays where there were so many more male characters.” Starting as an actor, Shields was enraged at the disproportionate roles for men versus women, and she has seen many women quit because it is too hard to find work.
The answer was to create work for herself and in the past few years Shields has worked her way from the Fringe, to Summerworks, to having her play If We Were Birds on the main stage at the Tarragon this season. “It was always in my brain when writing that I wanted to make a lot of roles for women because I think that’s the way to change things – make good work, and make work where there are lots of women onstage, behind stage and lots of women everywhere.”
Shields notes that theatre training is really centered on “the history of dead white guys”, and that women are expected to adapt to this to survive. “Women are more accommodating in terms of listening to men’s stories. We’re used to hearing men’s stories and thinking of them in terms of ourselves… I can see myself in Hamlet and I can see myself in Othello and I can see myself in Lear. I can identify with these characters. Men have a more difficult time doing that because they haven’t really had to.”
Although not scared to use the term ‘feminist’ in terms of the greater discourse, Shields doesn’t tend to use the word because she feels it puts women in a cage, and suggests that labeling a piece ‘feminist’ can alienate many audience members who could otherwise be moved by it. “It puts up a warning that says ‘oh this doesn’t relate to me’ – for men and for women,” she says. “It can make people disconnect from the get go… you can look at this as a voyeur, but this doesn’t affect you.”
Shields says she is tired of being labeled a ‘female’ playwright. “I guess we have to do that still,” Shields says. She’d rather a world where she is simply a playwright, and it’s just about the art. “If you think of women playwrights who have been very successful, I think they are poets who transcend the women’s stories, but aren’t afraid to have women’s stories. They write plays that are human, not just female.”
Stay tuned for part two, which will include my interviews with Beatriz Pizano and Kelly Straughan.
Mon June 21st @ 8pm. Theatre Centre. Queen & Dovercourt. PWYC.
Wrecking Ball #10 is on its way, and with works by artists Marjorie Chan, Melody Johnson, Bea Pizano, Schuyler (Sky) Gilbert & Roland Schimmelpfennig, you really want to be there. Click here for more information.
The Turn of the Screw DVxT Theatre
The Mill Theatrefront in association with the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
Spent Theatre Smith-Gilmour, Why Not Theatre and Theatre Run
Goodness Volcano
Blind Date Produced by Rebecca Northan, in association with Harbourfront Centre
OUTSTANDING NEW PLAY/MUSICAL
Norman Lup-Man Yeung Pu-Erh
Michele Smith, Dean Gilmour, Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza Spent
Hannah Moscovitch The Mill (Part Two): The Huron Bride
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard Gas Girls
Beatriz Pizano La Comuniòn
OUTSTANDING DIRECTION
Vikki Anderson The Turn of the Screw
Ross Manson Goodness
Nina Lee Aquino The Making of St. Jerome
Keira Loughran Pu-Erh
Christian Barry The Mill (Part Two): The Huron Bride
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A MALE
John Ng Pu-Erh
Jamie Robinson Gas Girls
Gord Rand Goodness
Clinton Walker The Turn of the Screw
Byron Abalos The Making of St. Jerome
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE
Tanja Jacobs Happy Days
Rebecca Northan Blind Date
Nawa Nicole Simon Gas Girls
Ginette Mohr The Belle of Winnipeg
Christine Horne The Turn of the Screw
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IN A FEATURED ROLE /ENSEMBLE
The Ensemble Spent
The Ensemble The Dining Room
The Ensemble 9 Parts of Desire
Michael Kash Where’s My Money
Mary Francis Moore The Catering Queen
OUTSTANDING SET DESIGN
Trevor Schwellnus La Comuniòn
Lindsay Anne Black Birnam Wood
Jackie Chau Gas Girls
Jackie Chau The Making of St. Jerome
Gillian Gallow The Mill
OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN
Nadine Grant The Turn of the Screw
Michelle Bailey The Red Queen Effect
Lorie Brown The Belle of Winnipeg
Dana Osborne The Mill
Andjelija Djuric La Comuniòn
OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN
Trevor Schwellnus La Comuniòn
Arun Srinivasan Pu-Erh
Andy Moro Reconciliation
Andrea Lundy The Mill
Andrea Lundy Aurash
OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN/COMPOSITION
Thomas Ryder Payne La Comuniòn
Richard Feren The Mill
Richard Feren Aurash
David Atkinson The Belle of Winnipeg
Brenna MacCrimmon / John Gzowski Goodness
Melissa Hood looks over her notes during rehearsal. Photo by Hugh Probyn
by Aislinn Rose
In October 2009, Struts and Frets blogger Kris Joseph posted On theatre in society: porosity in response to Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America, about the current dysfunction of funding models for American theatre, as well as Chris Ashworth’s Toward a New Funding Model for Theater, in which he argues that “the process is the product”, and therein lies a new approach to funding. Joseph asserts in his post that he is, “now more convinced than ever that theatre can and must distinguish itself from film, TV, and new media by being completely porous to its audience.” He goes on to write that theatre artists must share their process by becoming integral parts of the communities where they work, and that the community should feel completely part of that work.
The post inspired an equally interesting conversation in its comments section, with Praxis Co-Artistic Director & Director of Section 98 Michael Wheeler commenting that the work we were doing with Section 98’s Open Source Theatre project was in part an attempt to make our process integral to our relationship with our audience, in preparation for our work-in-progress presentation for Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH season. We though the issues we were addressing would benefit from discussion and wanted to get our community involved as early in the process as possible.
Another commenter wrote to say that he normally runs screaming from the room when it comes to “art as process” work, with only a few exceptions. However, he was in complete agreement with a point made by Ashworth (in reference to sharing the development process with the audience) about editing out “the boring bits”. Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Easier said than done I think.
It’s been a few weeks since our HATCH presentation and we’re still sorting through the feedback. In an effort to open ourselves up to our community, we recorded our process online and encouraged audience members to text us during the show with the texts posted live to our blog throughout the presentation, and we asked our audience members to continue sending us their feedback after they’d gone home and had a chance to reflect. Some chose to return to our blog with that feedback, and others emailed us or sent messages via Facebook.
Here’s our best attempt to provide an unbiased overview of the synthesis of this feedback under the major categories it addressed.
Open Source/Interactive:
Assistant Director Laura Nordin operated the texting software during the performance and transferred the comments to the website. Photo by Hugh Probyn
A text received during the show:
An unsolicited Facebook message after the show:
Do I want to meet? Hell yes! I had to google “experience design” to find out it was an actual thing.
And in response to the texting:
And from a texter with a smart phone with access to our blog throughout the show:
And from a post-show blogger:
The Q&A at the end of the show yielded a number of comments on this topic, with many saying they found the texting to be distracting, or that they prefer to lose themselves in the theatre rather than participating in every day life activities like texting. Others really liked that they were able to communicate with us throughout the show, but they wanted to see it further integrated into what they actually see onstage. Lots to think about here!
Multiple Plot Lines:
Greta Papageorgiu presents “Section 98 for Dummies”. Photo by Hugh Probyn
Section 98 was investigating the history of Civil Rights in Canada, with a particular eye on the Communists of the 1930s, the FLQ and the War Measures Act in the 1970s, and Afghan Detainees in the modern era. Some audience members found the inclusion of so much information to be confusing, or questionable:
The audience at the Q&A seemed to divide neatly into two camps on this issue. On the one side there were people who felt that the multiple topics were too scattered and they were having trouble tying it all together. Another perspective suggested this was not the time to condense our story yet… that we should “keep blowing it up and making us make the connections ourselves (which I’m sure we’ll continue to do for several days)” as one participant commented. Or, as it was put another way, “I kind of like you throwing a bunch of shit up there… you’re giving us homework”.
General’s Testimony:
Photo of the Three Generals from my iPhone during rehearsal.
As part of the presentation, we also included verbatim texts of the testimony given by General Rick Hillier, Lieutenant-General Michel Gauthier, and Major-General David Fraser after the explosive testimony of Richard Colvin, in which he alleged that Canadian Soldiers knowingly transferred Afghan detainees to torture in Afghan prisons. Here’s some of what we got during the show:
So we discovered that most people found this material to be deadly boring (including my mom). There were, however, a few people who found the transcripts to be interesting, while others suggested we could absolutely continue working with them… once we had sculpted it with our point of view. “There’s no such thing as neutral.” This is fascinating to me since we had been so concerned about taking the material out of context and were committed to presenting it exactly as we found it.
Omar Khadr:
Image by Darren O’Donnell
Omar Khadr also caused some disagreement. I am, of course, not referring to the real Omar Khadr, the one who was captured at the age of 15 and lives in Guantanamo Bay. I’m referring to another of our Open Source Theatre commenters who went by the moniker of “Omar Khadr” in response to Open Source Entry # 4: Checking for a Pulse. Some of these comments were included in our show. Here are some of the responses this material generated, in the order in which they were received:
Some thought the sections to be “extraneous” or “questionable”, while another said, ““Omar” really turned out to be a lynchpin of the show.”
Fake Omar requested that we not take him out of context so we recorded his text using an imagined internet/robot voice. While people couldn’t agree on whether or not we should have included this material, most could agree that the robot voice should go.
Jim Watts
Margaret Evans as “Jim” Eugenia Watts. Photo by Hugh Probyn
If there’s one thing that most people could agree on, it was Communist/Theatre Artist/Revolutionary Jim Watts… the kind of character I would have liked to encounter in Canadian History classes in public school. Here’s what people had to say about her:
More post-show feedback continued in this vein, with suggestions that Jim really is the anchor of our show. To me, this is one of the most successful aspects of this workshop because we were fascinated by Jim while developing Tim Buck 2 when this show started at the Fringe, but she really didn’t emerge as a centrepiece in that iteration of the project.
What Now?
So, what do we do when half of our audience tells us they hate something about our show, while the other half says, “it was our favourite part”? One commenter may have addressed the challenge of conflicting advice best:
“If I start commenting on Linux, [an open source, collaboratively developed operating system] no one is going to listen, for very good reasons (I don’t know much about code.) So, how, in this world of aesthetic and political difference, can you tell […] who to listen to – who shares any values.”
This question of “who to listen to” is a great one, and will be on our minds as we dig deeper into all of the feedback. Which of the responses can we add to our “source code” to enhance our work, and which responses will “crash” it? As we continue in our efforts to be “porous” with our audience, please stay tuned for Part 2 where we discuss our own responses to the feedback, and where Section 98 is headed.
“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
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