MOIRA DAY AND MARILYN POTTS
This article discusses the contributions of Elizabeth Sterling Haynes to 'drama-in-education'and to the Little Theatre Movement in Albertafrom 1922 to 1937, and in New Brunswick from 1937 to 1939. Haynes' dedication to acting, directing and, most importantly, educating, illustrates her passionate committment to theatre. The influence of her legacy continues through the people she inspired and the institutions she directed.
Les auteures de cet article parlent des contributions d'Elizabeth Sterling Haynes à la pédagogie théâtrale et au théâtre amateur en Alberta de 1922 à 1937, et au Nouveau-Brunswick de 1937 à 1939. Femme de théâtre accomplie, Haynes fit preuve d'un dévouement extraordinaire à tout ce qui se rapporte à la mise en scène, au jeu, et, ce qui est le plus important, à l'enseignement théâtral. Son influence continue par les gens qu'elle sut inspirer et par les institutions qu'elle dirigea.
Born on December 7, 1897 in Durham County, England, Elizabeth Sterling settled in rural Ontario with her parents in 1905. Between then and 1916, the 'Little Theatre' movement which was to play so dominant a role in her life, was taking its first tentative steps in the cities. This movement was a reaction to both a professional theatre run by foreign touring companies and an amateur theatre dominated by local churches or clubs producing the occasional comedy or concert skit to raise funds. A number of imaginative, informed minds saw in the innovative technical work of artists such as Craig and Appia, the plays of contemporary playwrights as Shaw, Synge, Galsworthy and Maeterlinck, and the example of the intimate 'art theatres' in America and Europe,' 1 the model for a homegrown 'art' theatre which would offer serious fare and opportunities for experimentation, local participation and training not then found in the commercial theatre.
By fall 1916, when Elizabeth Sterling arrived in Toronto to begin a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto, the matter of a serious native Canadian theatre had become all but eclipsed in the public mind by the more pressing concerns of the War. Consequently, the centre of the 'Little Theatre' movement began to shift from the community-atlarge to the University campuses. At the University of Toronto, this task was assumed by the women students, whose athletic and social organizations had always existed separately from the men's.'2
The Methodist College of Victoria which Sterling attended was no exception. Their production of Brown's Everywoman on 13 February 1917 for the war effort inspired such a wave of dramatic enthusiasm that the Victoria College Women's Dramatic Club (VCWDC) was formed the following autumn. Colonel Vincent Massey addressed the club at its first meeting on 19 November 1917 and quickly won its allegiance to the new I non-commercial theatre known as the 'Little Theatre' which is dedicated only to the representation of dramatic art. 3
True to the movement's taste for short intimate dramas, the VCWDC premiered with a bill of one acts, Overtones, Dunsany's The Gods of the Mountains and Moeller's Helena's Husband, in the Margaret Eaton School of Expression in February 1918. Moeller's satirical fantasy marked the campus acting debut of the club's secretary, Elizabeth Sterling, in the role of Paris. She became vice-president of the rapidly expanding club over the 1918-19 term portraying 'an excellent Orsino" 4 in the College's major spring production Twelfth Night. She performed the role again in an autumn revival of the production.
More significantly the fall of 1919 found Sterling as president of one of the largest and most active 'Little Theatre' groups on campus, at a crucial point in both the development of drama at the University, and of the 'Little Theatre' movement in general. According to Robert Scott, by 1919 the University of Toronto boasted the city's highest concentration of dramatic societies adhering to 'the Little Theatre principles of experimentation ... [and] offering the works of the latest Russian, Irish and English dramatists. " 5 Yet, all had been handicapped by having to work out of crowded, inadequate facilities in wartime conditions. In November 1919, this situation changed dramatically with the completion of Hart House Theatre on campus.
The theatre was born out of Vincent Massey's realization that the plans for Hart House, initiated in 1910, could be adapted to include a modern, up-to-date playhouse. Designed by Massey, the 1914-15 president of the Player's Club 6 'for the use of the University of Toronto and the wider community which it serves',7 Hart House Theatre attempted to strike a delicate balance between being a home for the various student dramatic societies on the campus, and a centre for the broader, more communitybased Player's Club. The services and advice of Roy Mitchell, the director of the Player's Club, were to be available on request to interested student dramatic groups.
Thus Elizabeth Sterling, the talented young president of the Victoria College Women's Dramatic Club came under the influence of Roy Mitchell, early member of the Arts and Letters Club, war-time director of the Greenwich Village Players and one of the most charismatic and innovative leaders of the Canadian Little Theatre movement.
Under Mitchell's influence, the programme of the Victoria Club witnessed several drastic changes over the year. Within a week of Hart House Theatre's triumphant opening bill of one-acts, the Victoria Club announced that they were replacing their proposed second offering, a full-length farce, with 'three more popular modern plays" 8 because of Hart House's success with the same genre. The Victoria Club was finally able to move into Hart House Theatre with their third bill of one-acts, and with Mitchell's extra coaching and advice on the productions, Elizabeth Sterling shone unusually brightly in her role as The King in Dunsany's Tents of the Arabs. Greater things were to come. Victoria's plans to do an all-woman production of Galsworthy's The Silver Box were abandoned in favor of participating in Mitchell's Player's Club production of Euripides' The Trojan Women. To Elizabeth Sterling went the central and difficult role of Hecuba.
It was a rare honour for an undergraduate to take a leading role in an early Hart House Theatre major production. In the midst of the production's incandescent technical splendour, Elizabeth Sterling herself shone brilliantly. The Mail noted:
The effectiveness of the presentation was largely due to the excellence of Miss Elizabeth Sterling who played Hecuba, Queen of Troy. Miss Sterling made a striking figure of the wife of Priam, and she has a voice which is a wonderful asset. It is not often one hears an inexperienced actress speak her part with dignity and a fine sweep of emotional feeling. 9
Mitchell that same year again cast Elizabeth Sterling in a non-student, open-air production of Love's Labour's Lost in the role of the Princess of France. The production was mounted in time for Convocation, and although a failed course prevented Sterling from making the Convocation list until the fall, her student days and her thrilling experiences at Hart House Theatre were to leave an indelible mark. If she was to embrace Mitchell's call to drive out the foreign 'money changers' from the theatre and build one from native talent, she was also to share his pragmatic awareness that the proper building 'tools' of discipline and technical knowledge had to be supplied in adequate quantitites. Mitchell's ideas on directing and acting profoundly influenced her. Sterling was to share his insistence on the director's crucial responsibility to provide the unifying artistic vision for a production and to coordinate all the elements of a production to that end. Throughout her career, she would promote Mitchell's theory that acting and indeed theatre was in essence the art of motivated physical and spiritual motion.'10
Mitchell's greatest impact on Elizabeth Sterling Haynes was to inspire in her an overall vision and a deep, driving sense of artistic and spiritual mission. Through Roy Mitchell, who preached with a prophet's fervor about a theatre which was to be a temple of the human spirit," 11 Sterling totally converted to the cause of theatre. Her conception of drama would be constructed on the same populist, deeply humanitarian base as Mitchell's.
After teaching for a year in upper New York state, Elizabeth Sterling returned to Ontario in August 1921 to be married in her parents' home in Cedar Springs to Nelson Willard Haynes, a dentist and fellow University graduate. Like Mitchell she was to leave the province shortly; however, where the 'master's' work in the Canadian theatre was all but finished, the 'disciple's' was just beginning. Through Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, Mitchell's ideas, and indeed the influence of Hart House Theatre were about to make their impact on Alberta.
Arriving in Edmonton with her husband in 1922, Haynes first made her appearance on the Alberta drama scene at the University of Alberta at the invitation of Dr. W. G. Hardy, a new classics professor, and old university friend of Haynes. As in Toronto, the campus was one of the major shelters of the Little Theatre movement in Edmonton during the early decades of the century. Now though the spirit was willing, a lack of physical resources and trained theatre people hampered progress. Consequently Haynes, with her Hart House experience, was eagerly welcomed by the campus dramatic society. In a series of productions between 1923-24 and 1928-32, Haynes exposed the University and Edmonton audiences to a striking new level of amateur drama. Into the city's steady diet of British and American comedies, she interjected such rich, complex fare as Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped (1928) and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1930). With Frank Holroyd, a talented scene designer recently arrived from Britain, she experimented with placing elements of Copeau staging, and expressionistic sets and lighting on the narrow, high Convocation Hall stage. Students accustomed to thinking of acting in terms of simple line memorization and blocking of movement were exposed to the rudiments of Stanislavskian technique, and rigorous personal and ensemble discipline.
A physically imposing woman, over 5'10", Haynes had a strength of will and character to match. Both Elsie Park Gowan and Barbara Villy Cormack, who acted in Haynes'productions of the twenties, recall her as a simultaneously terrifying and inspirational presence. Elsie Gowan, who acted in both He Who Gets Slapped and The Adding Machine, recollects that 'the other members of the faculty who directed plays were more interested in the literary quality and the speaking, than they were in the movement and total theatre effect. 12 Haynes, by contrast, reversed these priorities. While faithfulness to the author's intent and proper use of the voice were important to her, she shared Mitchell's view that the essence of the play lay less in its lines than in 'the ghost of the play' 13 - the movement of its living 'soul' in performance. It was the duty of the director to guide the actors into communion with this intangible 'soul' so they could translate it into a vital, physical presence on the stage. As Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Haynes' friend and former Extension secretary was to recollect:
She had gotten from this teacher, Roy Mitchell, who had been at Hart House, the concept of the theatre as a temple, and practically everyone who knew her came away with this feeling that in a sense it was holy ground ... had its roots in religious experience. And Elizabeth was the first person who perhaps put into words that there is such a thing as the spirit of man and part of the acting job is to expand and expend it; that there is such a thing as spiritual growth. So she gave you this sense of the world being a rich, illuminous place.14
Believing that one started from a point of inner awareness, then gradually worked outwards to fill the lines, Haynes spent, Mrs. Cormack recollects, a much greater part of the rehearsal time in discussing the themes and movement of the play as a whole, and guiding the actors increasingly into their characters. Stage movement and blocking, when formally introduced, were tied closely to character motivation. Mrs. Cormack, who was in Haynes' 1924 double bill The Tents of the Arabs (Dunsany) and Fanny's First Play (Shaw) remarks:
She was very strong on everybody having to know exactly what their character was and all about them. You would have to write practically an essay on this character, on where he came from and all his ancestors and everything else -what made him tick so that this would presumably come out when you acted him ... And then you sort of improvised so that you put in your own thing. Then, after that you polished it up and did what the author meant you to do. The lines came last. " 15
Haynes became the most prominent director in the city at a particularly critical point in the development of drama in Alberta. With the Stock Market crash of 1929, the 'Little Theatre' movement swept the province with surprising momentum. The strength of Haynes'work on campus, not only made her prominent enough to become the first continuing instructor of drama for teachers at the joint summer school sessions of the University and provincial Department of Education (1929, 1931-36), but the first artistic director of the newly-formed Edmonton Little Theatre (1929-32).
The latter position in particular, allowed Haynes an unprecedented opportunity to showcase, hone and develop her talents. There had been limits to how brightly her talent could shine in the course of one production per year in the cramped quarters of Convocation Hall before a predominantly academic audience. Her position in the Edmonton Little Theatre, on the other hand, supplied her with a broad, general audience, real theatre spaces to work in, 16 a pool of the best and most promising theatre talent in Edmonton, and the opportunity to select and direct twelve full-length plays over three years. Haynes, in turn, bequeathed the organization three popular, well-balanced seasons dominated by the work of British playwrights Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Maugham, Coward and Irvine.
Haynes' tenure as artistic director was not without its tempests. Haynes' considerable warmth and generosity of character was paired with a truly fiery temper. Her passionate faith in the gifts of the human spirit and imagination to overcome any barriers was of greater help in inspiring actors than meeting the cold reality of budgets. Nonetheless, she brought to the position a depth of energy, commitment and artistic quality which Mrs. Gowan feels were sadly missed upon Haynes' departure."17
Haynes' campus work also led to her being invited as the Edmonton Representative to the initial meeting of the Alberta Drama League in August 1929. In her provincial capacity, she directed the Edmonton entry at the League's 1930 festival in Calgary - the first provincial drama festival in Canada - sat on the League's play selection committee and broadcast the first series of drama production lessons and plays over the University Extension station, CKUA. In 1931-32 Haynes broadcast a series of weekly talks, 'The Story of the Theatre'. As a Canadian Chautauqua director and actress in summer 1930, Haynes was able to visit some forty of the little Alberta and Saskatchewan communities her broadcasts had been reaching. All of these activities put her directly in line for the position of full-time, travelling drama instructor for the Department of Extension when the Carnegie Grant was obtained in 1932.
The Department of Extension at the University of Alberta had been formed in 1912 by a far-sighted Dr. Henry Marshall Tory, the University's first president. Under the directorship of Albert Edward Ottewell (1912-1928) then Edward 'Ned' Armand Corbett (1928-1936), the Department had evolved into an extensive adult education service attracting the attention and praise of educators outside Canada. An unusually high commitment to cultural education had always been a distinguishing feature of the University's program in rural Alberta. This exciting new dramatic movement sweeping the province and indicating new directions to the rest of the country was a cultural phenomenon truly worthy of extra resources and attention. Corbett, aware of the doubled number of entries for the 1931 festival, the encouraging mail response to the CKUA drama programs and unprecedented demands on the Extension Library's drama section over the 1930-31 year, began applying, with Dr. Wallace's support, for grant funding. 18
In March 1932, Dr. Learned of the Carnegie Corporation of New York visited the Department. Favorably impressed by what he saw, Learned suggested that the University submit a request for assistance in the development of a fine arts program, including music, painting and drama to be administered by the Department of Extension. In May 1932, the University of Alberta received a promise of a $10,000 yearly grant for three years. The funding would provide for a full time drama instructor who would give direction to drama groups throughout Alberta and who could help teachers establish drama programs. The grant also supplied finances to secure competent adjudicators for school festivals (which included all performing arts) and to increase the morale of rural people by sponsoring art shows, school fairs, and Extension lectures in the fine arts.
Haynes, equipped with her initial training at Hart House Theatre and her subsequent 'Little Theatre' experience in Edmonton, had evolved into one of the province's most knowledgeable, skilled directors. At the same time, her radio, Chautauqua and Alberta Drama League work had given her a strong grasp of the rural dramatic situation in Alberta. She was the obvious choice for the position of drama instructor in the Department of Extension. Hired by R.C. Wallace, President, and under the direction of E.A. Corbett, Haynes began a career which would significantly alter the direction of drama education in the province of Alberta.
In assuming the Extension position, Haynes took on the responsibility for a 'theatre' truly vast and popular in scope, but one pitiably short on physical resources, good scripts and proper theatrical training. The problem was particularly acute in the rural districts. While 'little theatre' groups of good quality flourished in some of the smaller centres, like Banff, Innisfail and Drumheller, the majority of rural communities lacked the sort of knowledgeable, dedicated theatre people needed to make serious drama possible.
The more fortunate groups were able to rent the local opera house-cummovie house, but many had to perform on the cramped lecture stage of the local school, town or church hall. Lighting could vary from the distorting glare of footlights to candles or kerosene lamps. The better class of plays were for reading; for performance purposes, it was generally preferable to order a 'screamingly funny farce' which made no great demands on the budget nor local acting or directing skills beyond a knack for broad caricature and vigorous physical action and humor.
Despite the complexity of drama as a performing art, and the fact that most groups did it not just poorly, but under extremely adverse conditions, the amateur drama movement continued to gain momentum in rural communities during the thirties for reasons of its own. Elizabeth Haynes spoke of drama as satisfying a very human need for constructive self-expression and development. Drama also helped fill an equally compelling social need. In her book, Next Year Country, Jean Burnet suggests that the Depression had a devastating impact on a rural social structure already shaken by the lean years of the early 20's and urban drift. The farces did more than just give people a temporary escape from grim reality. Through forcing people to pool their talents and resources and work towards a common end, drama helped reinforce a sense of community at a time when the latter was in danger of disintegrating.
In addition, over half the productions staged in 100 rural communities surveyed over the year 1932-33 were executed under the aegis of the institutions most concerned with improving the social and spiritual quality of rural community life: the churches, the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) and the associated and independent women's service organizations - Ladies Aid (L.A.), United Farmer Women of Alberta (UFWA), Women's Institute (W.I.).
The school also actively promoted drama for similar reasons of social and personal development. The same 1920s and 30s which saw the flowering of the Little Theatre movement also witnessed a revolution in educational theory and practice giving drama and its sister arts a new importance in the school system. Based on democratic ideals and the newly developing field of child psychology, the 'New Education', originating in the United States, sought to replace the rigid academic training of Victorian times with a broader, more humanistic education aimed at producing well-rounded, socially adjusted human beings. Because children learn primarily through play or 'doing' and the full exercise of their capacities, the old rote-learning and mental discipline methods were to be replaced by activity or project methods. Drama, the most group and action-oriented of the arts, and the one demanding the greatest integration of various skills, suddenly became an important educational tool. Alberta, like the other Western provinces, took a keen interest in this new learning, and Haynes soon found herself in the vanguard of not one, but two, important dramatic movements in Alberta: community drama, and drama-meducation.
This then, was the face of the Alberta Theatre Elizabeth Haynes was to be associated with for the next five years. Nothing further from Roy Mitchell's sophisticated 'art theatre' could have been imagined but Haynes saw beyond the material reality of the Aaron Slick of Punkin Crick farces, crepe paper costumes, and collapsing scenery. In a set of lecture notes Haynes discusses this commitment:
In Alberta in the past few years the interest in the community theatre has been keen ... There has been tool in this province, a growing realization of the place of drama in the schools, and from the schools we may expect a powerful impetus towards the growth of a vital national drama ... The student who attains these qualities in school or college will bring to his community something for which there is a definite need. The effort expended in producing a play that provokes thought, a play that has power or beauty, whether it be comedy, tragedy, or melodrama, is not lost but gives rise to a renewed appreciation of living. The production of such plays engenders thought in the fields of economics, government, philosophy, morals, and world citizenship, for such is the stuff that modern drama is made of ... It is through those individuals who have learned well the crafts of the theatre and who have pledged their faith to its high purpose, that our community drama may come to express the spirit of this people. 19
Between 1932 and 1937 Haynes was to face two truly giant tasks - to awaken people to a fuller realization of drama's ability to express the needs of the human spirit, and to train people to produce good serious drama.
The Carnegie Grant committee faced the difficult task of formulating a job description for a position which had never been tried before: that of a travelling provincial drama advisor. They saw the position as satisfying such basic needs as expanding the hard-pressed Extension Library's play collection, helping with the adjudication of local festivals, possibly touring a play by the Edmonton Little Theatre with accompanying lectures to illustrate good and bad direction, and mainly the 'supervision of and assistance in the production of plays by groups in centres of the province where such help is requested."20 This model appears to have been an attempt by the Committee to find a balance between the high level of artistic control and quality that a good Little Theatre director would bring to productions and the need to help as many local directors as possible.
As the Viking News commented on a projected production of Malleson's Love at Second Sight by the local Les Camarades Society, 'The University sends out a director who aids in the choice of a play, in the selection of characters and in the actual direction. The play chosen must be approved by the director and must be from the pen of one of the better class playwrights.'21 Using this method, Haynes managed to arrange a string of in well-produced quality plays in high schools and communities right across the province in the first year of the program. Some, like a production of Shaw's Pygmalion on 3 May were done with fairly well-established rural groups like Mrs. Dorsey's Innisfail Amateur Players. Many others were accomplished with less experienced players in smaller or more isolated centres such as Grande Prairie, Mirror, Vermilion and perhaps most significantly, Ryley, where she helped direct local actors in Coward's The Young Idea at the first local Chautauqua in the Dominion.
In these tasks, Haynes was occasionally able to draw on the technical and human resources of the Edmonton Little Theatre. As well she toured a production of Shaw's How She Lied to Her Husband, with an Edmonton Little Theatre cast.
If Haynes worked hard in her fieldwork to impress on people the need for higher dramatic standards, she was also aware that there were limits to how many people could be effectively accommodated in this way. She therefore worked to expand the Extension Library's drama collection. With the best, most up-to-date dramatic literature and technical books, community and school producers would have a powerful resource for educating themselves beyond the initial inspiration of a field visit. Over the 1932-33 year Haynes added about 500 new plays to the existing 1,000. 22
Even the expanded library was not fully meeting all the demands placed upon the Drama Service. Haynes reported that 'approximately 250 dramatic groups have been given advice on lighting, make-up, costume, direction, play selection, organization and general information by letter, and letters from some two hundred individuals have been answered in detail. 23 Surely that alone was evidence enough of a very real need for 'an intensive course in the arts related to the theatre and the problems of the community theatre.24
It would appear that plans for such a school of Theatre Arts had been discussed as a possibility between Haynes and Corbett as far back as the 1931-32 season when Haynes had been broadcasting over the Extension Radio. The Alberta Drama League in Calgary 9 June 1932 decided to expand the idea to two schools, one in Banff and one in Edmonton. Unfortunately, the League was not a funding organization, and no special provision had been made in the grant for funding one, let alone two such schools. The difficulty with the Edmonton School was solved by co-sponsoring the latter with the Provincial Department of Education as a drama school for teachers. Haynes, who had directed the Drama courses at the Department of Education Summer School for a number of years, became the director of the first comprehensive course in the theatre arts to be given at a summer school organized by a Western Provincial Department of Education in 1933.
The need for the second school became increasingly evident to both Haynes and Corbett over the course of the 1932-33 term, and a decision was made to approach Dr. Wallace, President of the University, directly for funding. He gave his approval and a budget of $1,000 from the Carnegie Grant to finance the undertaking.
The first school (7-25 August 1933) advertised as the 'First Annual School of Drama', was staffed by Haynes; Theodore Cohen, a young Edmonton lawyer who had distinguished himself as a producer; his brother Eliot, an experienced stage craftsman; Gwillym Edwards of Calgary as Registrar-Treasurer, and Miss Gwen Pharis, a student. The faith of the school's founders was more than justified. Haynes and Cohen, both working about nineteen hours a day," 25 taught staging, costuming, directing, voice training and eurythmics to 230 students that summer. The majority were rural school teachers from the four western provinces.
The school's popularity increased the need for even more services as the enthusiasm and expectation for better standards rose. The nearly doubled demands on her time and resources forced Haynes to begin redefining and expanding the original parameters of the position. Over 1932-33, Haynes had been able to maintain a reasonably high level of artistic and technical autonomy over the productions under her control, and with her help, some rural groups had achieved remarkable artistic successes even in very small communities. It was becoming clear that such individual triumphs were not the most efficient way either to reach or train the large number still requiring help. There were limits to what could be done to turn town or church halls into proper theatre spaces; there were also limits to the amount of technical sophistication. The human resource was inexhaustible. The focus of the program, then, obviously had to shift away from helping to produce a limited number of highly polished artistic gems to finding better ways of educating people to educate themselves. Haynes' continued expansion of the library materials over all five years of the program was one such way of achieving this goal.
Haynes also made more extensive use of the radio as a teaching device. Over 1932-33, she had given a series of six general lectures on CKUA. In 1933-34, the radio talks were more pragmatic and regular in nature. For community drama practitioners there were lessons on playwriting and directing with Barrie's The Will being directed over the air; for educational drama practitioners, there were lessons in verse speaking and the directing of the play, The Bremen Town Musicians.
In the meantime, Haynes managed to spread her presence around more efficiently by combining her lectures to a given community with assistance to any local drama group far enough along in production to benefit from her aid. Again and again she urged groups to choose more dramatically serious plays. 'If a play is worth doing, it should be done for its integral worth,26 she argued, 'Don't be afraid to use the classics'27 and 'never hesitate' to pay the royalty 'always asked on the better class of play. 28
Haynes also stressed the importance of having a strong, competent director. The would-be actor was sternly warned that the amateur stage was no longer 'an excuse for the gratification of personal vanity' and the time was past'when the girls could show off their new dresses in new parts and the boys could imitate Noel Coward.29 Quoting Boleslavsky, she emphasized that acting was a rigorous spiritual and physical discipline. She urged actors to develop their powers of observations, and concentration, and to work harder on voice production while remembering that theatre is an art of motion and movement, and not the word. 'The human body, Haynes commented to one of her audiences, I was one of the most difficult instruments to play and required just as much practice as its musical counterpart. '30
Once a good play, a good director and actors were obtained, one had all the essentials needed for production. Lighting was important and merited extra time and expense but no special hall was required, and it was best to remember that 'plays that possess significance and beauty' could be done simply without elaborate scenery or costume'.31
While Haynes was a skilled and popular lecturer, she still felt that field visits were not an adequate solution to the 'ever-increasing demand for technical instruction'. Perhaps, as she suggested at an Edmonton UFWA meeting, the time had come to consider 'dividing the province into sectors so that groups of people could attend central schools for three or four days. 32 A few tentative experiments were made in the form of a three-day short course on acting, directing and stagecraft for the Calgary Theatre Guild in late November, and the incorporating of a drama course into Farm Young People's Week in Edmonton and the Women's Institute Girls' Club Convention at Olds in June and July.
If the 1933-34 year was a vitally important one in terms of re-defining the parameters and duties of the Drama Supervisor's position, the year 1934-35 was one of steady expansion and growth along the lines of the newly set pattern. In the summer of 1934, interest in local community Chautauquas increased dramatically and Haynes assisted with twelve of them across the province. Her involvement in other community festivals also grew as both an adjudicator and resource person. Haynes' work in the area of School Drama grew dramatically over the 1934-35 year.
In her first year, Haynes travelled to individual high schools giving local teachers much-needed help, but through her special attention to the School Festival Movement, which was beginning to become a province-wide community supported movement, she began to reach a much wider school audience of all ages. Drama gained a large and secure niche in the schools and on the festival programs because of Haynes' constructive adjudications, supplying of bulletins, plays and material, help with syllabi and verse-speaking broadcasts, and elocution. This work so popularized drama that G. Fred McNally (Administrator with the Alberta Department of Education) decided to include drama on the first Revised Secondary School Curriculum, (1936-37) making Alberta the first province in Canada to do so. 33 As a result, Haynes redoubled her efforts through the local schools of drama and increased in-class work to ensure the success of the program which she had helped draft in its initial stages in 1934. At the secondary level, she trained teachers to be capable of the high degree of technical ability and knowledge necessary to teach drama as a course. The highlight of the 1934 Banff School had been the establishment of the special children's drama division and the acquiring of the school's first outside instructors Wallace House, Haynes' own mentor, Roy Mitchell and his talented wife Jocelyn Taylor Mitchell.
During the 1935 Banff summer school, work continued in instructing, acting, eurythmics, directing, stagecraft, lighting, costumes, choric speech and playwriting. The most memorable play was written and brought to the school by Minnie Bicknell of Marshall, Saskatchewan. Entitled Relief, this play was later entered in the Saskatchewan Regional Drama Festival in Regina, March 1937 where it was awarded the Cameron McIntosh trophy. It also won honorable mention in the Dominion Drama Festival at Ottawa in April 1937 and was adjudicated the best topical play for 1937 by the University of Toronto Quarterly.34
The Carnegie Grant was discontinued from August to December 1935 while the Corporation assessed the value of awarding additional money to the Department. In reviewing its past achievements, the Corporation extended the Carnegie Grant for another two years with the recommendation that the University make provision for assuming the financial responsibility at the end of that time. Once again, the pattern of the Extension position began to change in the face of new demands. The four month hiatus in fieldwork placed a heavier demand than ever on the mail and library services. The number of communities wishing plays increased from 597 to 738, and the number of individuals assisted by mail from 670 to 1,600. The discontinuance of the playwriting competition only increased Haynes' mailwork, as Albertan authors continued to send in plays for the Dramatics specialist to critique.
As early as the second year of the program, Haynes realized the limitations of individual field visits and suggested that a series of small drama schools or 'short courses' across the province might be a far more efficient way of training large numbers of people in less time. What was needed was either an intense workshop situation over a short period of time, or continuous regular instruction over a longer period. Haynes, assisted by her close friend and associate, Theodore Cohen, experimented with a three month course in Edmonton. They were a little overwhelmed by the enrollment: 178 people, 'representatives of either the Edmonton Little Theatre or of some twenty groups in the city' eventually signed up for the sixteen Mondays between January 13 and April 27." 35 The intense workshop was attempted 'in towns where some form of theatrical enterprise had become an integral part of the community. 36 These were run in the format of a condensed Banff or Edmonton Summer School combining theory courses with a rehearsal-workshop situation. The fiveday school in Cardston and three-day school in Okotoks were both well attended with well over 100 teachers, and church, youth and community drama leaders attending each.
One limitation of the field visits had been the restricted amount of technical aid that Haynes could render, given both a lack of time and resources and her own comparative weakness in the area of stagecraft. In the first year she had borrowed materials and personnel from the Edmonton Little Theatre to help rural groups with their productions. In the second and third, she had given in person, and by bulletin and letter, a number of quick basic suggestions to better production methods. In the fourth year, Haynes launched a far more concentrated attack on the problems of rural staging techniques. One point of attack was the short courses. The second was two stagecraft manuals co-authored with Cohen and published over the 1935-36 year. The manuals contained a wealth of detailed and ingenious suggestions for solving common problems, acquiring materials or making one's own.
In the meantime, with the curriculum change now imminent, Haynes' involvement in educational drama continued to accelerate. To accommodate all who wished to be eligible to teach the new drama option, the Department of Education gave accreditation also to those who attended the theatre school at Banff in 1936. The Banff School, between the renewal of the Carnegie Grant and the incentive of accreditation, prepared to take a new lease on life as The Banff School of Fine Arts. In addition to the core instructors of Haynes and Cohen, Professor Joseph Smith of the University of Utah and Alexander Koiransky, from Seattle, (a former colleague of Stanislavski) were engaged. Yet, though The Marriage Proposal (Chekhov) and two concentration - pantomime exercises The Christmas Tree and The Groom in the Kitchen, presented by Koiransky with Haynes' assistance, were successful, it was in the children's classes that history was made. The 'Junior. Division' of the school, containing some 60 of the school's 180 theatre students, shared with the Edmonton Summer School children, the honour of performing Gwen Pharis Ringwood's first play, The Dragons of Kent.37
The new pattern set during the 1935-36 season continued to be expanded over the final 1936-37 year of the program. In this final year a considerable amount of Haynes' time and energy was spent in extending the dramatic courses in both Edmonton and Calgary. Calgary was open to community drama leaders, but even more dedicated to preparing teachers to cope with their new drama classes, especially since the drama option, in no small part due to Haynes' painstaking grass roots efforts, had proved among the most popular of the new subjects introduced to the secondary curriculum.
Three rural short courses were held at Clive, Red Deer and Camrose and drama was offered at the Olds Adult School of Community Life. The Clive School was particularly noteable. Since 1933, Haynes had judged the Clive annual local dramatic festival and a warm relationship had developed between the little community and the drama extension specialist. Despite the smallness of the town, 165 students attended its school, and the play Ali, the Cobbler, placed third in the Provincial Drama Festival. Two years later, again with Haynes' aid, the little community's production of The Bear was not only to take first place in the provincial competition, but to win for Clive farmer, Robert Haskins, the Dominion Drama Festival's award for the best actor in the national finals. 38
The 1937 Banff School was destined to be Haynes' final one as head of the Theatre Division. Encouraged by her success with her first play, Gwen Ringwood had gone on to help write radio plays for the 'New Lamps for Old' series over CKUA, a task she shared with Elsie Park Gowan. She also, with the encouragement of Dr. Alexander decided to apply for a playwriting scholarship at North Carolina, to study with Professor Koch at Chapel Hill:
I did apply with his recommendation and I asked Elizabeth for hers, and she said, well, you know, wouldn't it be nice to have Professor Koch come and teach here at Banff ... so really, it was through Elizabeth ... her recommendation and getting Prof here that set up the relationship .39
If, as Ringwood suggests, Haynes was instrumental in having Koch invited to Banff, 40 it was an inspiration which had a long term effect not only on Ringwood herself, but the Banff School and the province's native playwrights. Koch made such a success of the playwriting course that it became a regular and popular part of the School's program. Under Koch's direction four new plays workshopped on 26 August.
The 'play festival' did not end there. By 1937, with Haynes' continuing help and support, many of the smaller clubs in the province had also achieved levels of real quality, but had never been seen beyond their immediate district. Haynes therefore conceived the idea of inviting four or five of the good but lesser known clubs to produce and tour a play to Banff for public performance and adjudication by Koch. The Innisfail Amateurs and the Clive Dramatic Society provided two rollicking comedies, respectively joint Owners in Spain (Alice Brown) and The End of the Beginning (Sean O'Casey). Slightly more unusual was the Warner Playmakers' production of The No 'Count Boy, a negro folk play by Paul Green; coming from the tiny town of Warner in Southern Alberta, the Playmakers were a junior high school group, just formed in January, with no member of the cast over the age of 15. The Ryley Little Theatre demonstrated that small towns were vitally interested in Canadian social action theatre; they elected to mount Mary Reynolds' And the Answer Is.
Equally interesting were the two plays produced under Haynes' and Cohen's direction by Banff School students. The leftist Edmonton Progressive Arts' Club, formed only that spring, had enrolled at Banff as a group, and produced Theodore Cohen's own play on the farmer's co-operative movement, Help Yourself. The final play produced, Culbin Sands (Gordon Bottomley), which featured Haynes and Ringwood in the leading roles, was by contrast a mystic, poetic drama of the kind Haynes herself loved so deeply, and featured choric speech and dance.
Koch, who adjudicated the Little Theatre plays, was suitably impressed with the richness and variety of the province's amateur theatre, and complimented Haynes for her fine work in promoting the interest of Albertans in drama and for her achievement in building the Banff School of Fine Arts." 41 Koch's comment was a fitting valedictory to a remarkable five years of achievement.
In five years, Haynes had done much to merit Gwen Pharis Ringwood's later assessment of her as one of the truly seminal forces in the establishment of the Western Canadian Theatre. Haynes realized that the key to founding a strong Alberta theatre lay less in assisting groups to create good, individual productions than in educating and inspiring people to become theatrical creators themselves. Consequently, Haynes, even by the second year as Drama Extension Specialist, had begun to expand substantially the original terms of her position in order to reach more human resources with more efficiency.
Haynes' vision of the theatre as a deeply spiritual, populist form of human expression struck a deep chord in a province strongly influenced by its own religious and populist institutions. A whole generation of Western Canadian theatre practitioners were trained either by Haynes personally or through teaching institutions or methods she helped establish or pioneer. Her five years of rigorous work and experimentation had resulted in a basic model for drama extension work which was to be followed for the next 25 years in Alberta and would profoundly influence the establishment of analogous drama specialist positions in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
While the final year of Haynes' five year program in Alberta seemed busier and more productive than ever, it was also a year of increasing tension and frustration. Not only was the second Carnegie Grant slated to terminate at the end of 1937, and with it, the money for Haynes' salary, but the Department of Extension plans to continue the drama work without the Carnegie Grant would not include her in any case. This was partially because of society's attitude toward married women working outside the home. As the Depression deepened and unemployment worsened, the attitude toward working wives became increasingly hostile. Haynes was not only married, but married to a professional man and the mother of two school-age children." 42 As well, Haynes'lack of a graduate degree may have helped sway the Department to ease her out eventually in favor of a I suitable young Englishman holding a degree who had received special training in dramatics."43
Equally significant was the fact that two of Haynes' major allies in the founding of the Carnegie project permanently left Alberta in the fall of 1936: R.C. Wallace to take a position at Queen's, and E.A. Corbett to become Director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. Haynes did not enjoy the same happy, working relationship with Donald Cameron (who replaced E. A. Corbett in 1936) that she had with Corbett. This friction was to have a long-term effect on Haynes' career. Both strong-willed individuals, Cameron and Haynes were prepared to devote the whole of their considerable energy and talents to the development of a better arts scene in Alberta; yet, what might have been in other circumstances a happy marriage of creative and administrative genius, was frustrated by deep character conflicts and differing administrative approaches.
Fortunately a series of events in New Brunswick were to create a new position for Haynes in Eastern Canada. In the 1936-37 term - Haynes'last with the Alberta Department of Extension - Alberta was engaged in its third curriculum change since its founding, and had become the first province in Canada to add drama to the secondary curriculum. New Brunswick, on the other hand, was just beginning to update a school system which had remained essentially unchanged since 1871. Stung by the 1931 census' revelation that New Brunswick had the highest illiteracy rate in Canada, the province joined the wave of educational reform and finally established its own Department of Education in 1936.
Over the 1936-37 year, a blueprint for action was drawn up by the new Department under A. P. Paterson, the first minister, and Fletcher Peacock, the first director for educational services. Provision was made for an adult education program particularly in the rural districts, and the 'New Education' saw reform beginning with the teacher and his training; he therefore planned for the organization of a major comprehensive summer school during the summer of 1937. In early May of 1937, Peacock requested E.A. Corbett, by now head of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, to recommend someone to handle the drama division of the school. He specifically requested a drama educator familiar with rural teaching condition. Corbett recommended Elizabeth Sterling Haynes." 44 He felt that Haynes would be too busy with summer school work in Alberta to come to New Brunswick. Peacock decided to contact her anyway. Haynes was indeed fully booked for the summer, but she was anxious enough to be part of the new experiment to create time for it.
The month between 6 July and 6 August was to prove a fateful one for both Haynes and New Brunswick. Haynes' accomplishments at the New Brunswick Summer School were fairly modest compared to her Alberta work. Reflecting her interest in the folk play, Haynes began by having her class research the Fort La Tour incident from New Brunswick's past with the idea of assigning the writing and producing of a one-act historical drama. The project was too large to accomplish in such short time. Instead, the session produced only two quickly prepared one-acts: Chekhov's The Marriage Proposal and Brown's Joint Owners in Spain. One suspects that Haynes was making a virtue out of a necessity when she explained that the plays were being presented without costume, make-up, setting or properties as a way of teaching concentration to the actors. Nonetheless, New Brunswick had never experienced such a flamboyant, exotic giant of a woman, bubbling over with visionary plans, knowledge and enthusiasm. Her students, with Peacock's full blessing, petitioned the Department of Education to rehire her for the fall session. On 26 August, a wire to the Banff School confirmed her temporary appointment to the New Brunswick Department of Education. While Haynes' appointment to New Brunswick contained the same double community and educational drama focus as her Alberta position, various factors made the New Brunswick phase of her work quite different.
In Alberta, Haynes' work had spilled over strongly into the realm of education, although her main responsibilities were to a well-funded, well-established Department of Extension, which, in later years gave top priority to expanding its music, art and drama programs in adult education. In New Brunswick, by contrast, she was working in a fledgling Department of Education which was struggling to re-organize the entire school structure and to create a whole new adult education program on minimal time and resources. Moreover, the adult education program which began emerging in the fall of 1937 was much more strongly influenced by the Extension model provided by St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, consistent with Dr. Coady's philosophy that cultural and spiritual development' had to be preceded 'first (by) economic development, then social and political development. 45 New Brunswick's program, placed a much higher value on developing the I native industries' and 'home making' divisions of the program first. Drama was only one part of the proposed 'Community Education and Recreation' program, and the latter took a subordinate role to the Department's interest in creating a revitalized rural cottage industry based on weaving, clothes-making and traditional handicrafts. These factors limited the amount of community drama work Haynes was actually able to accomplish over the year in New Brunswick.
Nonetheless, Haynes accomplished significant strides with the folk play and the Dominion Drama Festival. The folk play idea, which had scant time to develop during the summer session, found more fertile ground over the winter. Beausel'our, a play about the tribulations of an Acadian family living in the shadow of the besieged Fort Beausejour was researched, written and produced with Haynes' help on 4 April at the Mt. Allison School for Girls. Even more successful was Haynes' association with the University of New Brunswick's Drama Society. Haynes, whose own imagination had been captured by the tragic story of Fort La Tour, was delighted to find a young student, Jack Thurrott, who had a similar interest in dramatizing the incident. During the months leading to the Dominion Drama Festival regionals in Saint John on 24 and 25 January, Haynes gave the young playwright much encouragement and advice on the script's writing and helped the student drama society produce it for the competition. The production, a free verse drama called La Tour directed by Thurrott's fellow student Norma Linton, the present Norma Springford, did not 'place' at the regional finals, but did tie with another Maritime script for first place in the Festival's 1938 competition for the best play by a Canadian playwright. Haynes had other reasons for pride in the 1938 St. John Regionals. In all, she assisted three of the eight entries.
Yet it was in the area of drama-in-education that Haynes made her greatest strides in New Brunswick. The one area in which the Department of Education gave top priority to the 'Community Education and Recreation' phase of its adult program was in teacher training. The 'New Education' demanded teachers who were well versed in the expressive arts Of music, art, folk dancing, drama and oral reading, and it was expected that these same teachers would also assume community leadership in the arts, particularly in the rural districts. Much of Haynes' considerable store of energy and experience was channelled into the area of educational drama. 46
Haynes, from her Alberta work, knew the value of bulletins, books, broadcasts and lectures in reaching mass audiences; Haynes thus turned to these means of reaching teachers in New Brunswick. Over the 1937-38 year, Haynes delivered three series of lectures on Oral Reading and Dramatics in Education to the Saint John Teachers' Association, the Moncton Theatre Guild and the Carleton County Teachers' Association. Three hundred and twenty five professional books on dramatic arts and dramatic teaching were purchased for a field library. One thousand bulletins were mailed to teachers, and over 1000 letters answered inquiries about community and school drama.
While Haynes certainly did not found the School Festival Movement in Alberta, her Extension work between 1932 and 1937 had done much to popularize its growth in rural Alberta. In May or early June, all the children of a given school inspectorate would converge on several of the local church, town or school halls in one of the larger towns in the district. All day long, a team of adjudicators assessed the efforts of several hundred students of all ages In the prescribed classes of music, elocution, drama and folkdancing. In the evening, the winners presented a public concert for the community-at-large. 47
Haynes preferred to make the festival model less competitive in nature; the adjudicators were to become simply 'remedial instructors' offering constructive criticism but no grading. However, Haynes was convinced that what the festivals had done for education and culture in rural Alberta, they could do for rural New Brunswick. By providing a showcase for the arts, Haynes argued that the festivals would provide teachers greater incentive to use the new activity methods and give greater emphasis to culture, self-expression and the arts in the classroom. Peacock was impressed by other aspects of the movement. It would provide socialization opportunities for children living in isolated rural communities and modify the disparity between town and rural schools. It would improve relations between the school and the community, helping to integrate the school and adult phases of the Department's education program. Finally, it would encourage the sort of cooperation between towns and schools that would ease the introduction of the larger county unit of administration.
The Department was convinced. And where the school festival introduced to Alberta in 1918 took a number of years to become established, under Haynes' direction it became a province-wide movement in New Brunswick in a single year. Enlisting the help of sympathetic school inspectors, Haynes travelled some 11,000 miles. As a result, nine festivals, involving some 150 schools, 350 teachers and almost 10,000 pupils across New Brunswick, had been established by spring of 1938.
Haynes' extremely active year in New Brunswick drew to a close with the Department of Education Summer School of 1938. This summer school was consciously formed to train teachers to be cultural and artistic leaders in their communities as well as in their classrooms. Haynes sank all of her considerable energy and talents into the single summer school, recruiting her old friend and colleague from Alberta, E.J. Thorlakson, to help with the expanded program. Thorlakson, a fellow-founder of the Alberta Drama League, agreed to teach the speech class. In keeping with I activity method' aims, all students were to be involved in the actual production of a play to gain practical experience in stage production.
The drama program of the 1938 school was by all accounts a resounding success. Norma Springford, who attended all three of Haynes' summer schools, credits Haynes with introducing New Brunswick teachers to Stanislavsklan acting methods and sophisticated improvisational techniques.
Despite a popular movement to retain Mrs. Haynes for at least another year, she left the province in September. While the Department valued Haynes as an initiator, they did not have the funds to create a permanent Drama Specialist position, and any permanent Adult Education positions which did open, they preferred to give to native New Brunswickans first. Haynes recommended E. Brock Rideout, the Black's Harbor director and high school principal as her successor, and on 2 January 1939, he was appointed Supervisor of School Festivals and Adult Education.
Haynes accomplished less in New Brunswick than in Alberta, but spent only one year establishing a program there, as opposed to five years in Alberta. As well, the upheaval of the war followed soon after and the ambitious summer schools were among the first victims of wartime austerity. Yet, as Haynes prepared to leave New Brunswick for the last time, she had reason to feel content with a job well-started. Under Rideout, following Haynes' model, the festivals had continued to grow over the 1938-39 term. Moreover, with Rideout heading the new Department of Adult Education to begin that fall, Haynes had every expectation that drama would become an important part of the new adult education program. Further, through her own visits and lectures in the communities and three intensive summer schools, Haynes had introduced sophisticated acting and educational methods and inspired a considerable body of teachers to serve as drama leaders in their classrooms and communities.
Though increasingly plagued by poor health over the 1940s and 1950s, Haynes was to remain an active supporter and participant in the drama scene in Canada. As head of the drama section of the Allied Arts Council during the war years (1943-45), she wrote radio plays for the war effort, staged plays and entertainments for the troops, and ran a small community drama program out of the South Side library. As an Edmonton Public School Board Trustee (1945-47) and founder and head of the Women's Theatre Guild (1952-55), she helped to offer scholarships to promising young actors, and to give general moral and financial support to school and children's theatre in the city.
Haynes is perhaps best remembered as one of the important early directors, teachers and supporters of the University of Alberta Drama Department and Studio Theatre under Imbert (Bob) Orchard. Between 1949 and 1955, yet another generation of theatre practitioners, including Tom Peacock, Grant Reddick, Jo Cormack, and Walter Kassa, came under Haynes' influence in productions such as Macbeth (1951), The Silver Tassie (1952), The Cherry Orchard (1952), The Braggart Warrior (1954), The Enchanted (1954) and Playboy of the Western World (1955). She is also remembered for her production of Othello which represented Alberta at the 1953 Dominion Drama Festival finals in Victoria and her brilliant performance of the lead role in Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot (1951) under Orchard's direction.
Grant Reddick now acting instructor at the University of Calgary notes:
Her biggest thing was a reverence for text. What does the playwright want and what have you got to do to get it out. I discovered a lot about sub-text from her. Things like preparing the scene off-stage. The detail in building up a character's life. We also got an enormous training in dramatic literature. One experienced drama and was made to attack it in an intelligent way."48
Her health steadily worsening, Elizabeth Haynes left Alberta with her husband to return to Eastern Canada in late 1955. After spending some months with their daughter in Toronto, the Haynes moved to Clinton. There, Haynes once again began to conduct drama classes and direct plays over the winter of 1956-57. She died in the spring of 1957 while completing casting for her final play, a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.'49 This play formed a fitting epitaph to a career dedicated to the human spirit and the small town.
Though Elizabeth Sterling Haynes died at the relatively early age of 59, she bequeathed an impressive legacy to Canadian theatre. Many other early great women of Canadian theatre such as Betty Mitchell, Mary Ellen Burgess, Norma Springford, Elsie Park Gowan and Gwen Pharis Ringwood came under Haynes' inspiring influence at early or formative stages in their own careers. As Gwen Pharis Ringwood noted:
Elizabeth was a force; a creative energy unleashed at a time when creativity was suspect, and at a place where creativity was often ignored in the hope that it would go away.
The Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Theatre has never existed as a building. That, perhaps, is Alberta's shame. But she often quoted her first mentor, Roy Mitchell, as saying 'You do not build a theatre with bricks. You build it with people.'
Her theatre exists in the people whose lives she touched. In remembering Elizabeth, let us remember, that she demanded greatness."
50
As the first drama specialist in Alberta's Department of Extension, Haynes served as a model for those who followed. She brought the philosophy of theatre learned at Hart House from Roy Mitchell to the west. She co-founded the Banff School of Fine Arts which has become a well-known and respected international school. She wrote the first high school drama curriculum paving the way for Alberta's leadership in Drama Curriculum."50 She dedicated her Extension years to drama in education and awakened the province to a realization of the important contribution that drama can make to community life.
This legacy to Alberta and New Brunswick merits her a place as one of Canada's most influential pioneers of drama.
1 Among the various 'art theatres' usually cited as influences on the Canadian movement are The Chicago Little Theatre, Provincetown Players and American Drama
League in the United States, and the earlier Freie Biihne, Moscow Arts Theatre, Theatre Libre, Independent Theatre, and Abbey Theatre in Europe.
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2 Though the University of Toronto had become officially co-ed in I * 884, even by 1916 sexual segregation was more the rule than the exception on the campus. The sexes
led parallel but separate existences in both the classrooms and the colleges.
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3 Varsity 14 November 1917
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4 Varsity 3 March 1919
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5 ROBERT BARRY SCOTT 'A Study of Amateur Theatre in Toronto 19001930,'MA in English, University of New Brunswick, Vol 1 p 251
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6 The Players Club was reorganized in 1919 to include the Arts and Letters Club. Membership was restricted to male undergraduates, graduates and staff of the University of
Toronto.
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7 The Hart House Theatre, Toronto: A Description of the Theatre and the Record of Its First Nine Seasons 19191928, The University of Toronto 1928 p
4
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8 Varsity 5 December 1919
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9 Mail 3 March 1920
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10 ROY MITCHELL Creative Theatre, London, Noel Douglas, 1930 p. 186-87. To Mitchell there were four kinds of motion. 1) Motion from one place to another resulting in
Composition. 2) Axial motion is motion on the actor's own axis. Somewhere between to and fro motion and gesture. It is the hinging of motion -the degree of erectness, successive angles of the body as well as relative positions of head, trunk and legs. 3) Gesture proper including
facial expression. 4) The vortex swirl of force within the actor, at its greatest when he is physically motionless. When it is active in him he compels attention. It is the
power by which an actor draws or relinquishes the spectators' interest.
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11 Ibid, Part Two
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12 Moira Day with Elsie Park Gowan, Interview, January 10 1985
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13 ROY MITCHELL as quoted in 'The Gateway', 24 October 1922, on the occasion of a Lecture on the University of Alberta campus.
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14 Reevan Dolgoy with Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Interview, The Archives, University of Alberta, Accession No 83.28.23.
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15 Moira Day with Barbara Villy Cormack Interview 14 August 1986
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16 The unused Pantanges Theatre was rented over 1930-31, and the New Empire now largely 'black', over 1931-32.
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17 Day - Gowan Interview
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18 While Corbett's book, We Have With Us Tonight leaves the impression that the University did not consider applying for the grant until Dr. Learned's visit. A 20 July
1932 letter from Corbett to a Mr. Bendickson clarifies this point.
'With regard to the Carnegie Fund, we opened negotiations with the Corporation two or three years ago and Dr. Learned visited us last March. I then submitted a plan for
"The Committee in Charge of British distributions". This was accepted.'
The Lethbridge Herald of 24 Feb 1932 also records the election of Corbett to the Presidency of the Alberta Drama League andhis mention of
hoping to hear shortly about the grant.
'Mr. Corbett said he hoped to have a representative of the Carnegie Foundation present at the meeting but some delay had occurred to
prevent this. The fact, however, that the representative was coming gave reason to hope that the grant would be made'.
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19 The Archives, University of Alberta, Accession No. 83.28.31 Lecture notes received from Walter Kassa who claimed they were from Elizabeth Sterling Haynes.
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20 'Tentative Programme adopted by Committee' Director of Extension: Correspondence 3/2/5/2-1 University of Alberta Archives.
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21 The Viking News 1 March 1933
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22 Department of Extension Annual Report 1933
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23 Ibid
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24 ibid
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25 GWEN PHARIS RINGWOOD, 'Some Memoires of the Theatre in Alberta,' (n.d.) Personal Paper on Amateur Theatre from University of Alberta
Archives, Acc. No. 69-2811.
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26 The Camrose Canadian 18 October 1933
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27 The Lethbridge Herald 20 October 1934
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28 The Sedgewick Community Press 16 November 1933
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29 Calgary Herald I April 1936
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30 Calgary Herald 1 April 1936
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31 Lecture notes (Kaasa Collection)
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32 Edmonton Bulletin 20 January 1934
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33 References to extra primary and secondary school section in 1935 Report from the Department of Education show dramatics as a subject on Programme of Studies for
Grade IX and Departmental Regulations Relating to the Grade IX Examination for the year 1936-37.
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34 Relief. A Play in One Act by Minnie Evans Bicknell. Toronto: The McMillian Company Ltd. 1938.
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35 Department of Extension Annual Report 1936
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36 Ibid
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37 Peggy Leighton and Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Interview, 10 August 1982
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38 Marilyn Potts with Elsie Park Gowan, Interview, Edmonton, Alta 8 February 1980
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39 Peggy Leighton and Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Interview, 10 August 1982
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40 The final decision and actual invitation, of course, came from Donald Cameron himself, as acting head of Extension. He himself implies in
Campus in the Clouds, it was not a decision he arrived at independently but in consultation with others on the Banff Committee.
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41 The Crag and Canyon 20 August 1937
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42 This is also suggested by the fact that according to Gwen Pharis Ringwood, she had to keep her marriage a secret when applying for the
Extension job in 1938-39. While the 'secret' came out well before the year ended, and the University did not act on it, she felt she would not
have been initially hired had her marital status been known then.
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43 University President Kerr recommended securing the services of a new appointee to the English Department as he could function in two departments. Memo. 19 Aug 1936, titled Re; Department of Extension signed by Dr. Kerr.
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44 Letter from E. A. Corbett to Fletcher Peacock 31 May 1937. Records of the Director of Educational Services, RS 116 4/2/1, Provincial Archives
of New Brunswick, Fredericton.
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45 The St. John Telegraph journal 20 August 1937. Coady is quoted in Muriel J. Lutes' article, 'Saint Francis Xavier Extension Work'.
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46 Department of Education Annual Report, New Brunswick, 1938.
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47 Department of Education Annual Report for New Brunswick, 1938.
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48 Marilyn Potts with Grant Reddick Interview Calgary Alberta 28 June 1976
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49 Moira Day and Dr. Shirley (Haynes) Appleby, Interview, 3 September 1983 and Aileen Craig of Clinton Ontario (letter and clippings)
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50 GWEN PHARIS RINGWOOD, 'Elizabeth Sterling Haynes,' 1974, Univ , ersity of Calgary Special Collections.
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51 The Province of Alberta is the first in Canada to have an Elementary Drama Curriculum and is presently rewriting its Secondary Drama
Curriculum.
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52 Special thanks to Anne Payne for editorial comment.
Moira Day
University of Alberta
Marilyn Potts
University of Calgary