JOHN A. HAWKINS
One of the main points of contention in the Canadian theatre has centred on ownership of Canadian stages. Should stages be owned by people trained in a classical approach to acting in a self-described professional training school, to do traditional plays for audiences drawn mainly from the advantaged classes of society? Or should they be owned by people whose individual social and/or political attitudes and agendas lie at the heart of their commitment to a more populist theatre? This article shows how a paradigm of bifurcated thinking came about historically and resulted in the creation in many post-secondary institutions of two kinds of programs: professional-oriented training programs reserved for a small, specialized group of students; and liberal arts theatre programs for a larger group of students possessing a wide range of talents, skills, and abilities. The open question for postsecondary theatre today is whether distinctions between these approaches to theatre are still relevant or appropriate, given the changes in the nature of the definition of professional theatre in Canada. It is critical to open an interrogation of current paradigms and practice.
Un des points principaux de conflit dans le théâtre canadien s'est concentré sur la propriété des scènes canadiennes. Les scènes devraient-elles appartenir aux personnes qualifiées dans une approche classique d'interpretation, formées dans les écoles dites professionnelles pour présenter des pièces de théâtre traditionelles, aux auditoires tirés principalement des classes privilegiées de la société? Ou devraient-elles appartenir aux personnes dont les attitudes et les priorités sociales et/ou politiques se trouvent au coeur de leur engagement à un théâtre plus populiste? Cet article démontre les origines historiques du paradigme de la pensée bifurquée, et la création conséquente des deux genres de programmes dans plusieurs établissements post-secondaires: les programmes de formation professionnelle, reservés à un petit groupe specialisé d'étudiants; et les programmes d'arts libres en théâtre pour un plus grand groupe d'étudiants possédant un éventail de talents, de qualifications, et de capacités. Aujourd'hui, étant donné les changements à la définition du théâtre professionnel au Canada, la question de la pertinence et de la justification des distinctions entre ces deux approches au théâtre reste ouverte. C'est d'une importance primordiale d'ouvrir une interrogation des paradigmes et des pratiques en vigueur.
I began writing this paper in response to my concerns about my own Department -- the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta. The Department is not unique; there are parallels and similarities to other Canadian postsecondary drama programs. I begin with our Department because the duality I will describe in this paper is particularly obvious here. We have two kinds of undergraduate programs: the conservatory programs of the Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Acting, Theatre Design, and Technical Theatre; and the liberal arts programs of the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education degrees in Drama. Within the Department, the conservatory programs are defined as professional programs, and the liberal arts programs are considered to be non-professional and entirely separate from the conservatory programs. Although the BA and BEd curricula include practical courses in drama, including acting, collective creation, directing, movement, theatre for social action (Popular Theatre), voice, and speech, these are taught separately from the curricula of the conservatory programs; students in the BFA do not take any practical drama classes with BA and BEd students.
This situation has existed since 1968, and has gradually created problems that were exacerbated by the Klein government cutbacks between 1993 and 1997. In 1997-98, about 50 students were enroled in BFA programs, while more than 160 Drama Majors were enroled in BA and BEd Drama programs. The numbers for the BFA programs have remained relatively constant for some years; those for the BA and BEd have steadily climbed, especially since 1990. Yet access to space and resources within the Department, especially for productions, is extremely limited for BA and BEd students. The Department's production program is comprised almost entirely of the work of the BFA (and MFA) students, and the BA and BEd students are not allowed to audition for major roles in the productions offered as part of the BFA program. The conventional wisdom has been that, because the BA and BEd students are not professional theatre trainees, they have little need for access to production beyond rudimentary performances in their classrooms, and that they take drama only to pursue their interest in theatre as teachers, educated audiences, and amateur performers. This may have been more true than false in the increasingly-distant past, at a time when students entering the university had little exposure to plays beyond supporting their local community theatre, or were involved in teacher-directed school productions. However, for the past dozen years, Alberta students entering the BA and BEd programs have increasingly had a greater wealth of experience, including TeenFest, the Fringe Theatre Event, and ArtsTrek. High school students have written their own plays, directed or played major roles in productions for Fringe audiences, organized TheatreSports tournaments and collective productions, participated in new play workshops, directed their own school productions with minimal advice and guidance from teachers -- in short, many have worked, often for pay, as theatre entrepreneurs. An increasing number see a future for themselves in theatre, but not necessarily in traditional theatre organizations. Clearly, there is a need to address the implications of their changed expectations for postsecondary educational theatre, including whether the notion of professional theatre training should be redefined.
My point of view in this paper is primarily historical and not prescriptive. Following my historical overview of how postsecondary theatre training came to be constituted in a specific way, my subsequent objectives are: to undertake an interrogation of traditional assumptions about the definitions of professional theatre; to raise questions about the traditional view of the way in which postsecondary theatre training relates to professional theatre as it exists today.
One of the main points of contention in the Canadian theatre, at least since 1919, has centred on ownership of Canadian stages. By ownership, I am referring to the artistically-aware public's approval and support of a certain artistic approach to theatre, and the consequent domination of stages by people whose background and artistic approach is consistent with this approval and support. For postsecondary institutions the question is: Should the stages be controlled by people who are trained in a classical approach to acting, in a professional training school, to do plays that are either established or modern classics, for audiences who are significantly drawn from the advantaged socio-economic classes of society? Or should control be shared with people whose individual social and/or political attitudes, viewpoints, or agendas lie at the heart of their commitment to theatre, in reference to performance content, training, and relationship to audience; people whose training is more general, but nonetheless includes experiences in all the theatre arts?
Since 1919, there have been various manifestations of these two views. Examples of the first approach to ownership -- which we have come to consider mainstream theatre -- include the bending of the original mandate of the Hart House Theatre toward what one commentator called "commercialism and professionalism" (Wookey 273); the creation of the Dominion Drama Festival by the Governor-General in 1932, which subsequently co-opted the Little Theatre movement; the founding of large regional theatres across Canada in the late 1950s and 1960s; and the creation of an educational theatre whose primary purpose lay in creating "a small number of talented, trained, experienced personnel capable of expert professional performances" (Skinner 13).1 By the late 1940s, this mainstream theatre had become legitimized by such words as "expert," "qualified," "professional," and "art." Postsecondary training programs established between the late 1940s and the late 1960s tended to emphasize a skills-based curriculum, teaching techniques, including movement and speech, to serve performances of classical or other traditional plays. Significantly, the organizational model of theatre adopted by this approach was the employer-employee, management-labour model: the theatre worker gains his or her access to an audience by means of being employed by a management acting as intermediary -- artistic, administrative, and financial -- to present the remunerated work of the actor and others to a paying audience. Part of the mentality of the actor trained in the conventional system has been to see himself or herself as an auditioner for parts established by an artistic management who chooses the plays to be done, and who then determines the conditions by which the actor will or will not be hired. From Toronto's Jupiter Theatre in 1951, through the Stratford and other summer festivals, through the regional theatre system of the 1950s and 1960s, through the alternative theatre movement of the 1970s, most Canadian theatres have adhered to this general model, and postsecondary training programs have served it.
Examples of the second approach to ownership -- or what I will call community-based theatre -- include the original Little Theatres in the early 1920s; the Workers' Theatre Movement in the 1930s; the Collective Theatre movement in the 1970s; the emphasis on Popular Theatre techniques in the sphere of theatre for social action in the 1980s and 1990s; and the proliferation of Fringe Theatre festivals across Canada since 1982. By the late 1940s, practitioners of community-based theatre were being described by those in the mainstream as engaging in "play" (as opposed to "art"), as having merely "a high degree of interest" in theatre, and as both creating and being part of "a trained audience" (Skinner 13). Significantly, the organizational model of theatre adopted by the community-based theatre has been one that establishes a more accessible and direct relationship between theatre artists and their audiences. Edmonton's Fringe Theatre Event particularly exemplifies this model. One of the basic tenets of the original Fringe philosophy is to provide direct access between theatre artists and their audiences, without the mediation or interference of artistic management.
By 1949, these two kinds of theatre -- mainstream and community-based -- were established as separate and distinct, and as having only one relationship: the second group would provide the large pool of people from which would be drawn the few who would occupy the first group.
In September 1922, a small article titled "The Hart House Theatre" appeared in The Canadian Forum. The point of view expressed is typical of one pervasive view of the relationship between theatre in an educational institution and the larger public function of theatre: "if opportunities of acting were to be scattered broadcast it is evident that the theatre would not profit...from the training and experience it afforded" (754).2The author asserts that it is necessary to limit access to the best opportunities in the educational theatre to a few people; that to open such a theatre to "as large a number of undergraduates as possible" inevitably results in "crude performances" of which "the public would be likely to weary." The author's insistence on limiting opportunities to the few is an early example of the direction in Canadian postsecondary theatre toward training programs that much later would refer to themselves as professional.
Less than two years later Gladys Wookey complained that:
the whole original intention of the [Hart House] theatre has been thwarted by a spirit of commercialism and professionalism. We have deliberately adopted the attitude of the professional, with that manner of sophistication and those commercial standards which have effectually robbed us of any spirit of adventure and enterprise....That is why the future of the theatre lies in the hands of the amateurs. (273)
Wookey makes clear that, by the word amateur, she is not referring to "amateur theatricals," but to the "amateur Little Theatre of today, where a serious purpose and experience gained must more than equalize success" (Wookey 273).
When the Little Theatres first began to appear in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the term professional theatre in Canada referred specifically to resident companies in Montreal or Toronto, and to road companies that toured to various regional cities and towns across the country, playing in theatres built to accommodate their productions. The term professional theatre specifically did not include the Little Theatre companies located in regional centres which used local actors, directors, and other staff. Between 1919 and the early 1940s, Little Theatres, amateur by definition, were established in many regional centres. Their original charters typically declared objectives to provide cultural activity for the community, to encourage new plays by Canadian writers, and to promote higher standards of production, festival activity, and cooperation among theatre groups.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Little Theatre movement would be co-opted by a leadership elite. In November 1931, within months of being sworn in, the new Governor-General, the Earl of Bessborough, stated that the Little Theatre phenomenon provided the basis for "a great Drama League, Dominion wide," which might give birth to "a movement for national drama" (Lee 88-89). His call echoed what others had been saying for some years. In 1928, Herman Voaden had written:
Little theatres are springing up in great numbers. Many of them are abortive in character and poorly led. The great need is for an organization to encourage the formation of these new groups, to guide them in the direction of artistic activity and to point the way to a distinctly Canadian drama. (106)
The culmination of the Governor-General's efforts, significantly facilitated behind the scenes by philanthropist-tycoon Vincent Massey, was the creation of the Dominion Drama Festival at a formal meeting in October 1932 at Government House in Ottawa. The sixty-odd people attending this meeting arrived in "rented limousines," the "gentlemen sporting top-hats and ladies white-gloved to the elbows" (Lee 89). From subsequent descriptions of DDF events, lists of Board members, and preparations for each year's DDF Final, it is clear that, from the start, the most economically-advantaged, most mainstream, most politically-connected, most conservative elements of society controlled and directed all aspects of the DDF. By the late 1940s, the DDF had been thoroughly co-opted by a commitment to mainstream theatre.
The Little Theatres across Canada, bolstered now by the formal structure of the DDF, performed their plays in formal theatre buildings, or venues that aspired to be such spaces. The idea formed that only certain kinds of physical facilities were suitable for the performing of plays; Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto was regarded as a prototype for Little Theatres across Canada. Built in 1919 by Vincent and Alice Parkin Massey, Hart House Theatre had a five hundred-seat raked auditorium, a proscenium opening thirty feet wide, a stage twenty-two feet deep, with an up-to-date lighting board and equipment, and in-house facilities for constructing scenery, costumes, and props.3
In the early- to mid-1940s, the arts community began to participate in postwar programs being developed under the general rubric "reconstruction and re-establishment." On June 21, 1944, following their "March on Ottawa," a delegation of Canadian artists and arts supporters representing sixteen organizations appeared before the House of Commons Committee on Reconstruction and Re-Establishment. They presented a summary brief, written by Voaden, exhorting Ottawa to include provisions to support the arts in the government's post-war economic plans, in part by establishing a number of "civic cultural centres" (6) across Canada, each of which would include a "properly-equipped" theatre (6A).4
The result of all these developments was that, by 1948, the mainstream theatre was characterized by a number of features: actors who exhibited "mastery," defined as "the best actors available" drawn from the few "who have shown aptitude" ("A" 754); a degree of "commercialism" (Wookey 273) in play choice; a commitment to a national drama, which meant high-quality productions of established and/or international plays; a "properly equipped" (Voaden 1944, 6A) "picture-frame stage," complete with "a proscenium, front curtain, and a cyclorama" (Physical Fitness Division 1);5 and the support of a politically-connected, economically-advantaged citizen class.
On the other hand, the community-based theatre was characterized by an entirely different way of thinking. The Workers' Theatre Movement of the 1930s was a major example. Not only did this theatre involve people drawn from a different segment of society than that connected with the DDF, but other differences included the kinds of scripts that were performed, the way in which theatre events related to the audience, and the performance venues themselves, which were mainly found spaces. One of the playwrights and proselytizers for this theatre was E. Cecil-Smith, who, in October 1933, wrote, "...the artificial stimulus given to [the Little Theatre] movement by his Excellency, the Governor-General, is no sign of health, no sign of life -- quite the reverse" (39). He wrote of the Workers' Theatre:
Here is the new Canadian dramatic movement in very truth. A drama rooted in the lives and struggles of the toilers of Canada's shops, mines, farms, and slave-camps. Plays written in the heat of life by the same workers. Mass recitations and plays presented by worker-actors who understand what they are doing because they can live the very parts they take. (Cecil-Smith 39)
He referred to "the elaborate fakery" of the Little Theatres and contrasted the performances of the Workers' Theatre: "...the play itself must be so strong that it grasps the very guts of the life of the audience" (Cecil-Smith 39).
However, by 1940, the economic prosperity resulting from the industry generated by the Second World War put an end to this more immediate, minimalist, populist, and ad hoc theatre. After the War, with the resumption of the Dominion Drama Festival system, the Canadian theatre began an uninterrupted journey into the future, following the mainstream theatre traditions that were solidly established by the late 1940s.
This, then, was the environment into which the university theatre in Canada stepped in 1947. The postsecondary academic units devoted to drama and/or theatre developed quickly, beginning with the University of Saskatchewan in 1945, Queen's University in 1946, and the University of Alberta in 1947. Two influential individuals in university theatre at the time were Emrys Jones at Saskatchewan and Robert Orchard at Alberta. In 1946, Jones stated:
if Canada's drama is to be truly cultural, artistic, well-informed, and of a high standard of performance, if it is to have its proper leaders, writers, producers, and audiences, there is need of training on a high level; and only our Universities are equipped and staffed and organized to give such advanced education....
A National Theatre cannot exist only with trained artists and producers; it must also have a trained audience....the purpose of teaching drama should not be to train only "experts" and practising artists in the theatre any more than the purpose of teaching history is to train only teachers of history. It is to be expected that a few students will specialize in drama in order to make a career of the theatre; but the vast majority of them will follow the drama courses only as a development of their cultural appreciations. (322)
Jones makes certain assumptions here. One is that any university theatre program must be tied to the pursuit of a National Theatre, defined in the June 1944 Summary Brief as a "State Theatre for professional musical and dramatic productions," "supplemented by a chain of regional theatres," providing "a large auditorium" designed and "properly equipped" for drama (Voaden 6-6A). Another assumption is that only a few students will specialize in drama in order to make a career in theatre. This article helped to fix the idea that there are those whose talents will fit them to go on to work in the profession, defined by 1946 as the mainstream, and those who -- no matter the amount, or even the quality, of their amateur theatre work -- will be fitted only to remain a "trained audience" whose "cultural appreciations" have undergone "development" (Jones 322).
On August 12, 1949, Mr. D. Park Jamieson, Chairman of the Dominion Drama Festival, and Dr. H. Alan Skinner, its Honorary Director, presented a brief on behalf of the DDF to the Massey Commission.6The DDF brief reiterated some of the themes of the 1944 Summary Brief prepared for the House of Commons committee, particularly the idea of using theatre to promote national unity. However, the DDF Brief introduced a new theme that dealt with the need for the Little Theatre movement -- now the DDF and its attendant activity -- to help provide and support theatre training for a "professional theatre," and to develop that professional theatre: "The theatre, while...providing a great means of education and an instrument for the promotion of ideas and ideals, is, at the same time, a training ground for those interested in developing the arts of the theatre, including writing, acting, speaking and designing...." The DDF Brief was specific about the need for trained personnel to teach drama in schools:
This whole field of education and instruction in the theatre arts and play-writing, requires an organized program and adequate provision of trained personnel....While some universities have made small gestures in this regard, no adequate provision has been made for the training of qualified artists and technical experts in the field generally. (10)
But it was in the oral remarks by Dr. Skinner on August 12, 1949, that the DDF fully stated its position on theatre training:
In considering the advantages and benefits which the arts of the theatre provide from a national viewpoint, we should remember that the final benefits are at the apex of a pyramidal structure, the broad base of which extends across Canada...and finds its foundation in the efforts and ideals of hundreds of community drama groups whose active members are numbered in the thousands. (Skinner 13)
Skinner rigorously avoided using the word expertise when alluding to the quality of the work done by the "active workers" labouring in "community drama groups," and he noted that they are able only to "develop a high degree of interest [in] the various arts associated with the theatre." Skinner continued:
This interest, once developed, has two important results. First, there will emerge at the top of the pyramid a small number of talented, trained, experienced, personnel capable of expert professional performances and suitable for employment in the theatre, in the making of motion pictures, or in radio-drama....Secondly, this community interest in the theatre arts provides an ever-increasing audience appreciative of the arts generally. (Skinner 13)
Skinner's use of the pyramid image is significant, because it clarifies a strict hierarchical distinction between, on the one hand, "professional" people who are "talented, trained, [and] experienced," and, on the other hand, "active [theatre] workers," numbering "in the thousands," who are capable only of developing a "high degree of interest" in theatre, and are therefore fit to comprise an audience "appreciative of the arts generally." It is significant that the articulation of this distinction was so rigorous and categorical just at the time that postsecondary academic programs devoted to theatre training were being established. This distinction was at the heart of the philosophies underlying these programs: the principle was established that the professional few at the apex of the pyramid should be subsidized and sustained by the appreciative many who toil at its base.
In the early 1950s, during the lead-up to the DDF Finals in Calgary, the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta published a double issue of a new publication called Western Theatre, designated "Festival Number," which contained an article titled "Theatre in School," written by Robert Orchard and Gordon Peacock, who are viewed today as the principal founders of our Department. This article supported the mainstream direction of theatre culture at the time, and echoed Dr. Skinner's comments of a year before:
what does live theatre mean to the average citizen of this country? Does it mean Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Shaw and Sophocles? Does it not mean the last play put on by the high school, church or recreational group? And such plays stand in relation to the great Greek, Elizabethan and modern dramas as a "Western" does to "Wuthering Heights," or boogie-woogie to Beethoven. And yet this is what theatre means in so much of our school dramatics. (45-46)
The assertion is clear: play production at the amateur level is substandard and inadequate. This passage also tars all "school dramatics" with the same brush of inferiority, no matter how polished the performance, no matter how committed the effort. Orchard and Peacock continued:
Such techniques as are given [in school dramatics] have usually to do with constructing and painting scenery, arranging lights and pulling curtains at the right time, all of which is merely the picture frame of drama. Indeed, the situation would be paralleled [sic] in the art room if more instructions were given in making picture frames than in painting pictures. The art of the theatre being first and foremost the art of the actor, it stands to reason that dramatic classes should concern themselves largely with acting -- awakening the imaginative and creative life of the students as actors and presenting them with a properly graded series of techniques, techniques of voice, movement and inner interpretation. For while acting in the elementary grades is indistinguishable from play...by grade nine it is possible and even desirable to begin presenting a more technical approach, so that the plasticity and ready imagination of childhood can be retained and developed in the service of art. (Orchard and Peacock 46)
The assertions, that "the art of the theatre" is "first and foremost the art of the actor," and that the other "techniques" associated with the theatre are literally window-dressing, are significant. Implicit is the belief that exploring a creative process without undertaking and undergoing "a properly graded series of techniques...of voice [and] movement" is merely "play," as distinguished from "art." Given the historical context, it is understandable that Orchard and Peacock would have espoused these views.
Historically, in our Department, the writers of the BA and BEd Drama curricula -- the base of the pyramid -- have been discouraged from using the word "acting" to describe the content of their acting courses. This is because, in the mainstream view, the word "acting" is consistent only with the work of the BFA students -- consequently, six of the core courses in the BFA (Acting) curriculum have the word "acting" in the titles. Because the BA and BEd students are, in the mainstream view, merely developing their cultural appreciations, the BA and BEd curricula are obliged to use words and phrases such as "dramatic process," "creative process of drama," "creation of dramatic form," "participatory techniques," and "scene study" to describe their course content. The reasoning behind this convention supports the principle spelled out almost fifty years ago by Skinner, Orchard, and Peacock: that a small number of actors, who represent the art of the theatre, occupy the apex of the pyramid as experts trained in a technical approach; and that active workers who are keenly interested in the arts of the theatre labour at the base of the pyramid to comprise an appreciative audience, as well as a pool of talent from which a few can be drawn to be submitted to a properly-graded series of techniques that may enable them to move to the apex.
In 1999, the open question for postsecondary institutions is whether the distinctions between mainstream and community-based approaches to theatre are relevant or appropriate any longer, given the changes in the nature of what constitutes the professional theatre in Canada. Most postsecondary theatre training programs came into being under circumstances very different from those that exist now. It has become critical to open an interrogation in reference to the implications of these changed circumstances, and I offer five major questions below as a way to begin the discussion. My responses to these questions are offered not to suggest any final answers, but to prompt further discussion.
1. What constitutes the professional theatre in Canada today?
The definition of the term professional as applied to the Canadian theatre has always been problematic. During the 1950s and 1960s, amateur theatre groups could be distinguished easily from such organizations as the Stratford Festival (1953), Manitoba Theatre Centre (1958), and Edmonton's Citadel Theatre (1965), and the definition of professional seemed somewhat straightforward. However, Canadian professional performers were not part of any professional union until US-based Actors' Equity began operating in Canada in 1955. Canadian Actors' Equity was not established as a separate organization until 1976, the same year that the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) was established. Only when these organizations were in place did it seem possible to define professional precisely: someone employed by a member of PACT, under the terms of a contract recognized by Canadian Actors' Equity or another professional union. However, if we agree to this limitation, then we are applying the term professional only to the employer-employee administrative model, which has been one of many among theatre groups. In addition, even with an apparently clear definition, it has always been difficult to assess whether or not certain transitional, marginal, or alternative theatre groups are professional.
For example, beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present day, many groups have worked in the area of Théâtre Populaire -- Popular Theatre. One method of this form involves actors facilitating non-actors -- the principals in their own stories -- to tell the stories in dramatic form to an audience. While some members of the company may belong to a performers' union, and thus are professional, they may perform with non-actors. Yet these organizations, such as Edmonton's Catalyst Theatre, a PACT member, are usually considered professional by both their communities and funding agencies. In fact, some of the work done by this theatre company during its first ten years between 1977 and 1987 occasioned a special clause in the Canadian Actors' Equity contract, called the "Catalyst Addendum," instituted in 1987, which exempted Catalyst, a professional organization, from certain aspects of the professional contract.7
From the 1970s through the present, many groups have been founded on a cooperative basis, because the participating artists have felt that everyone involved -- whether union members or not -- contributed significantly to the work of the group. Originally, many groups used this model for artistic, social, political or other reasons. More recently, in response to reductions in funding and donations, some professional groups have embraced the cooperative model as a viable alternative to standard funding options and restrictions.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Fringe theatre festivals have provided performance venues for many different kinds of performers -- actors, buskers, directors, playwrights -- who may be members of professional unions, but may just as easily be students, or workers from other fields. However, Fringe audiences are famous for not acknowledging any distinctions among Fringe performers -- the definitions of professional and amateur evaporate before a large, enthusiastic, ticket-buying public. If many of the non-union Fringe performers realize an income from Fringe activities sufficient to support themselves for a period of weeks or months, then what is the significance in this context of the distinction between professional and amateur?
What about entrepreneurial artists who plow their earnings back into their own companies? They may pay themselves no salary; they may write themselves no contract; the administrative structure of their companies may preclude the employer-employee relationship. Are these artists professional only if they are members of Equity, working to an Equity contract? If they are members of Equity, but are repeatedly given exemptions to perform without such a contract, then what happens to their professional status? Obviously, the very definition of the term professional is unclear.
2. What should be the relationship between a postsecondary theatre department and the current professional theatre in Canada?
In two interviews that I conducted with D.D. Kugler in May 1996 and July 1998, he discussed the philosophy underlying aspects of the theatre curriculum at Simon Fraser University, where he is now employed as a teacher. In the earlier conversation, he referred to the philosophical stance that over the years has been articulated by Marc Diamond. In the later conversation, Kugler reiterated it in his own words, and said that at Simon Fraser, the faculty advise students aspiring to professional acting careers that the most important question facing them is different than it used to be. In the past, the question most often was, "Who are you going to audition for, and what's your audition piece?" Now, the pertinent career question increasingly is, "What kind of theatre do you want to do, and who are you going to work with to create it?" This change in the question has implications for everything from the administrative structures of theatres and school drama programs, to training methods, to play selection, to assignment of resources.
The first question assumes the hierarchical administrative model, based on the employer-employee relationship, in which the auditioning actor requests entrance into a group of technically-skilled workers. The suitability of the auditioner for a specific job often pertains only to how his or her mastery of certain performing skills is seen to suit a predetermined role in a predetermined play.
On the other hand, the second question presumes that the number of places in existing mainstream theatre companies is already limited and likely to become more so, given government cutbacks and declining private donations. It proposes that theatre artists themselves will identify their own artistic objectives, and from a time early in their artistic development will strive to find like-minded colleagues with whom to fashion mutually-sustaining careers out of work created and performed in common. Among today's university drama students, from early on in their programs, or even from their high school years, many are already creating networks of people who possess diverse and complementary abilities, in what amounts to a professional career strategy. The notion of a suitable theatre venue has also broadened, with many found spaces sufficing for performance. While there is nothing new about the use of found spaces for theatre, companies working in such spaces in the past invariably aspired to more properly-equipped venues. However, many of today's young theatre entrepreneurs believe that such found spaces are the right spaces, and have little desire to "move up." Perhaps postsecondary drama programs need to develop ways for their curricula to lead, rather than to follow, this natural shift towards greater independence and entrepreneurship among students.
3. How can we make the best use of dwindling resources to bring effective and appropriate training to a wide range of potential theatre workers?
The fully-equipped physical plants of many postsecondary drama or theatre departments in Canada require formally-trained staff to run them. Such plants often parallel those that exist in the regional theatres, with their attendant artistic, administrative, and technical production staff. The staff may be full- or part-time, paid or volunteer; some functions may be done by students as part of their course work. Whatever the details, the structure is hierarchical, and management of these functions typically represents many remunerated person-hours. The problem comes when the learning activities of a relatively small proportion of the total student body, who may be in a professional training program, use a disproportionate share of available resources -- including staff person-hours, which represent a significant proportion of budget dollars. This may leave the largest group of drama students -- liberal arts and education drama students -- with a disproportionately smaller share of the overall resources.
In the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta, there is a large infrastructure of professional personnel -- stage manager, costume management, electrician, stage carpenter, property master -- whose work relates primarily and directly to supporting the production activities of the Department, especially those in Studio Theatre, the main public performance venue. It is important to point out here that Studio Theatre exists specifically to showcase the work of students enroled in the Department's professional programs (BFA and MFA), and not the work of students in the liberal arts programs (BA, BEd, and MA). Although all of these professional personnel diligently and generously respond when called upon to demonstrate certain of their skills in a teaching situation, they are not primarily employed as teachers, or even as curricular supervisors of students. The work of Studio Theatre, which forms the main part of this professional personnel's work hours, is structured to mimic the work of the mainstream regional theatres by mounting a season of three or more fully-equipped theatre productions, making use of this personnel as professional theatre workers. Given this situation, the question is: If our postsecondary theatre graduates will likely spend much of their careers working entrepreneurially in non-traditional theatre organizations and venues, how does the work done by Studio Theatre, aimed at preparing some of our students for a mainstream theatre career, support the Department's overall training programs? How could the person-hours of the professional technical personnel be altered toward primarily teaching and supervising students, rather than be used simply as skilled labour?
For example, between 1995 and 1997, the liberal arts programs of our Department staged three productions in the alternate theatre facility in the Timms Centre, the Second Playing Space. The philosophy behind these productions was based on the principle that, although none of the students involved was professionally trained in these skills, all of the expertise necessary for mounting the production was located in the ensemble of students who volunteered for the acting, dramaturgy, design, and production groups. For each of the productions, the Director facilitated the acting and dramaturgy groups, and the Coordinator of Design and Technical Production facilitated the other groups. The group facilitation was deliberately conducted in such a way that the artistic choices and decisions for each production were made by the students themselves during, not in advance of, the rehearsal period. The ensemble, at certain times during the rehearsal period, called upon the expertise of the Department's professional personnel for very limited advice and assistance, which was generously given. However, all of the functions of the production -- the design of all elements, including setting, costume, and soundscape, set construction, lighting design, and operation -- were created and operated during, and as part of, the rehearsal process by the student ensemble. This certainly facilitated greater independence on the part of the students involved than is typical or even possible in a mainstream production process, in which the professional personnel usually make decisions in production meetings, out of view of the acting company and the technical support staff and outside of the rehearsal process.
A non-hierarchical model such as the one described above, which by design does not mimic the work of mainstream theatres, can ensure that students so facilitated will always bring a wide range of personal skills and knowledge to the creative process of developing work suitable for postsecondary audiences. For these three productions, if even a few more person-hours of the professional theatre staff had been available, the staff could have supervised or coordinated the students' work even more extensively, and thus enriched the learning experience for everyone even further.
4. What are the implications, for the curricula in our undergraduate programs, with respect to the fact that students come to us with considerable performance experience, with quality production standards, much of which has been completed subsequent to high school, and may include experience not only as actors and stagehands, but as directors and playwrights?
High school drama experience varies considerably across Canada, and even within provinces. However, the theatre experience of the typical urban high school drama graduate is much greater than twenty-five years ago. Now, it is common for students to have had experience not only as actors and technical labour, but as directors, playwrights, stage managers, visual and sound designers -- even as dramaturges of established or new work. When these students enter the first year of a postsecondary liberal arts drama program, they may need a certain amount of orientation to the resources available at the specific university or college, but they often do not require basic training to use these resources at an acceptable level of expertise. The challenge is to structure and supervise learning opportunities, and to make resources available, in a way that maximizes student initiative and self-motivation.
5. Given the extraordinary diversity of professional theatre organizations, approaches, and styles that include everything from performing Shakespeare or Cyrano de Bergerac on the Stratford or Citadel stages, to empowering groups of disadvantaged people through techniques of social action theatre, what is our responsibility, as postsecondary theatre educators, to the overall community we inhabit? What are the ways in which we can answer and discharge that responsibility?
We must stop thinking that postsecondary educational theatre has to parallel the structures, style, and content of mainstream regional theatres. There was a time when postsecondary theatres were asked to assume the role that was filled later by mainstream regional theatres in communities across Canada. For example, Edmonton's Studio Theatre at the University of Alberta, founded in 1949, was one of only two live theatres in the city until the Citadel Theatre, Edmonton's first professional theatre, opened in 1965. There was a time when the large regional theatres across Canada were the sole markets for graduates of postsecondary professional training programs. There was a time when the byproducts of theatre education for general students not intending to enter the professional theatre were few and specific, and merely related to fostering good work habits for a hierarchical and non-theatre workplace: enhanced confidence and self-esteem, improved speaking and deportment, as well as interpersonal social skills.
Today, as we have seen, there are more diverse theatre and theatre-related markets for graduates of all drama programs. In addition, the byproducts of theatre education now encompass attributes identified as essential to today's much less hierarchical workplace: flexibility, resourcefulness, initiative, independence, cooperation, networking, and commitment to a goal greater than the sum of its parts. Work in theatre fosters and develops all of these skills, and inculcates the independent attitude that must underlie them. As it may now be the case that the traditional distinctions between mainstream and community-based approaches to theatre are no longer relevant, it is incumbent upon postsecondary departments of drama to embrace an expanded perspective about what constitutes professional theatre, and of the place of theatre in the postsecondary education which ostensibly prepares students to make their careers in it. Departments must be prepared to reconfigure their curricula and resources to enable a larger number of students both to enter the theatre in all its various professional manifestations, and to use the independent attitudes developed through their theatre education in whatever work they may choose to do.
Obviously, if any further discussions of these and other questions were to develop a consensus about potential reallocations of resources available for postsecondary theatre education, then other, more practical, questions would have to be formulated and addressed, such as: What interplay between or among specialties within theatre training would be useful to any or all programs at a given postsecondary institution? How could all programs benefit from a shared, or partially-shared, curriculum? How desirable is it to focus such a large proportion of resources to public performances that mimic or duplicate those already available from local theatres, especially when the main purpose of such performances may have at least as much to do with generating revenue for the institution as with pedagogical objectives?
The "pyramid" analogy, now a half-century old, used to describe the theatre in Canada, has always been false. It offered an idealized social model of how the theatre could be seen. As with any theoretical model, it proposed that what it described was neat, tidy, and definable. But the Canadian theatre, as is apparent, has always been dynamic and messy; this is part of its vitality. For the pyramid analogy to hold, there has to be an apex: a single, definable point called professional theatre. But it is clear that there is no single definition of professional, that people educated in a variety of drama programs can work side by side comfortably, both in mainstream and alternative theatre, and that professional theatre groups are enormously varied in their organizational structures, their physical plants, their approaches to scripts and performance, as well as in the backgrounds and preparation of their personnel. The lines of distinction between professional and non-professional have always been blurred, and are even more indistinct today. If the apex of the pyramid cannot be defined, then the pyramid analogy collapses. Postsecondary departments of drama must examine the appropriateness of their adherence to this false model, and decide whether or not they want to do what is necessary to ensure that all of their students have the opportunity to realize the full potential of all of their talents, skills, and abilities in a redefined postsecondary theatre.
NOTES
1 The Brief is dated July 1949, but the oral remarks
were made by Dr. Skinner on August 12, 1949.
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2 The phrase "scattered broadcast" is an archaic, nineteenth-century
usage. As a term in agriculture, it refers to the practice of scattering
seed generally over the land, rather than in specific rows or furrows.
The writer is denigrating the practice of providing acting opportunities
to a larger proportion of the student body as one which necessarily fails
to discriminate as to talent or ability.
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3 Herbert Whittaker, "Hart House Theatre," The Oxford
Companion to Canadian Theatre, eds. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989): 255-257.
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4 On the reverse of page 6 of the copy of Voaden's Summary
Brief is a handwritten note, presumably written by Voaden himself: "These
auditoriums, if properly equipped, could be used by local groups for Little
Theatre performances as well as Dominion Drama Festival performances."
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5 From the minutes of a meeting in Kingston, Ontario, arranged by the Physical Fitness Division of the Department of National Health and Welfare, chaired by Michael Mieklejohn and attended by Herman Voaden, Charles Rittenhouse, and William Angus. These gentlemen were four of the most knowledgeable about, and influential upon, Canadian theatre at the time. The official agenda for the meeting was a discussion of the need for visual aids in the field of theatre arts in Canada, and focussed mainly on a seemingly-innocuous proposal to create a filmstrip "for elementary instruction in basic techniques" of theatre, and what the filmstrip should contain. However, the effect of the meeting would be to direct the thinking of personnel working in the mainstream theatre across the country in reference to the physical facilities required for a "properly-equipped" theatre.
At one point in this meeting, these gentlemen formulated a question:
"How should a [theatre] group, that has already found auditorium accommodation,
spend such monies as it could [sic] accumulate?" The answer they provided
to this question included a prioritized list of what a small theatre group
in Canada should possess as basic physical facilities: a stage; a proscenium;
a front curtain; a cyclorama curtain; simple lighting of the spot type;
and some means of controlling the lighting.
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6 Although the Massey Commission is generally known
by this name, its official name was The Royal Commission on National Development
in the Arts, Letters and Sciences.
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7 From an interview conducted with Julie Brown in Edmonton
on May 20, 1997. Julie Brown is a former General Manager of Catalyst Theatre.
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WORKS CITED
"A." "The Hart House Theatre." The Canadian Forum (September 1922): 754.
Brown, Julie. Personal interview. 20 May 1997.
Cecil-Smith, E. Letter. "The Workers' Theatre." The Canadian Forum (October 1933): 39.
Governors of the Dominion Drama Festival. Brief: "To The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences." July 1949. MG28I50, The Theatre Canada Collection, National Archives of Canada.
Jones, Emrys M. "The University's Duty Towards Canadian Drama." Culture 7 (1946): 311-324.
Kugler, D.D. Personal interview. May 1996.
__________. Personal interview. July 1998.
Lee, Betty. Love and Whisky: The Story of the Dominion Drama Festival. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973.
Orchard, Robert and Gordon Peacock. "Theatre in School." Western Theatre: Festival Number (Winter and Spring 1950): 45-49.
Physical Fitness Division, Department of National Health and Welfare. Meeting minutes. 2 August 1948. G28I50, The Theatre Canada Collection, National Archives of Canada.
Portman, Jamie. "Program." The Calgary Herald Magazine (25 August 1967): 2.
Skinner, Dr. H. Alan. Oral remarks. "To the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences." July 1949. MG28I50, The Theatre Canada Collection, National Archives of Canada.
Voaden, Herman. "A National Drama League." The Canadian Forum 9 (December 1928): 105106.
__________. "Brief Concerning the Cultural Aspects of Canadian Reconstruction, Being a summary of fifteen [sic - sixteen] briefs presented to The Special Committee on Reconstruction, House of Commons." 21 June 1944. National Archives of Canada.
Wookey, Gladys. "The Glory Hath Departed." The Canadian Forum (June 1924): 273.