Rosanna Saracino

Rosanna Saracino is an Italian-Canadian director, dramaturge, educator, acting coach and costume designer, who has worked in the professional theatre industry for more than twenty years, with forays into directing and acting coaching in film, TV, video and documentaries. She received her MFA from York University in Directing, was the Director in Residence at the Canadian Stage Theatre and at Shadowpath Theatre as part of the Femme5 Operative, is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of art & lies productions. She held the post of the Head of the Acting Division of the Randolph College for the Performing Arts for twenty years, and has been an instructor with the college for as long. Currently, she is teaching at George Brown, in the Theatre Department, as well as at TFS. Her freelance work has extended to companies such as the Classical Music Conservatory, the Canadian Opera Company, the PowerPlant. She is specialized in working with large casts, and stylized and physical theatre, and has worked extensively in classical and modern adaptations, new play work, and devised theatre. Directing credits include: Nasty by the Maelstrom Art Collective (winner of the 2017 Patron’s Pick/TOFringe and Storefront Theatre’s Feminist FuckIt Festival), Suitcases (Artscape Sandbox/Canadian Stage, art&lies), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Helen Gardiner), Killing Game by Eugene Ionesco (art & lies), No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (Passe Muraille/art&lies), Lord of the Flies by William Golding (all female adaptation), Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht (Young Centre for the Performing Arts/George Brown Theatre), and the world premiere live actor version of Provenance by Ronnie Burkett.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 150 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

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You know what? If you feel like dropping me a line to say hi, remember that you can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod. And you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickabee. And my website is philrickabee.com. My guest this week is dramaturge, educator, acting coach, and costume designer, Rosanna Saracino.

I’ve wanted to talk to Rosanna for a little while. She’s been teaching actors and teaching people to act at various schools for many years, and she has a lot to say about teaching actors and how the industry is changing. So she’s seen it all.

I really enjoyed my conversation with her, so here that is. So just to get started, before we start talking about teaching theatre, which is something that you do, I notice you’re teaching at George Brown, as well as you are head of the acting division at Randolph. I actually just stepped down from that role as of September 1st.

Okay. But I did it for 20 years. 20 years is a long time.

It is a long time. It’s a long time. So first off, before we get into teaching, theatre, what made you want to do it? What brought you to theatre? Before we even started talking about directing, what you’ve done and everything else.

I’m Italian. I grew up in a rather operatic environment. It bordered largely on melodrama, some absurdism, and I spent most of my Saturdays and Sundays surrounded by dozens of people interacting loudly, and the cliches were all true.

I was a really shy kid, though. I did not speak much at all until I was about 11. Very, very shy.

And so I really spent a lot of that time observing these people, these crazy people. And there’s something about, maybe it’s the gestural system and the culture, the ritualism of cooking and social interaction and dynamics between men and women. There’s something about that that I was acutely aware of from an early age.

I would say that’s one part of it. I would say another part of it is when I was a kid, a kid’s theatre company came to my grade school, and we were not allowed to enter the gymnasium until it was time to see the show. We were forbidden to do such a thing.

And I don’t know why, but this shy kid in me decided to wander the halls and enter the gymnasium. And I remember cracking open the doors and this surge of movement of these actors who were creating the set, obviously a travelling company doing kids’ shows, and they’re setting up the set. And of course, I didn’t really have any knowledge of this.

I was really young. I was like four, five, or six. And at the centre of it, I’m just going to, here’s true confessions, at the centre of it was this very tall, lanky man with red hair, and I’d never seen a red-haired man in my life.

And I generally thought he was magic. What is that creature? I literally related to it that way. And of course, I know this is an application in retrospect, but some part of me believes that I somehow understood what I was witnessing, and then got to see the show later that afternoon, and the kind of sense of rapture and delight and transformation that was possible, which also in some weird ways related to going to these Italian church ceremonies every weekend with my family, this kind of larger-than-life, sacred space where anything is possible or the surreal seems to be possible.

I also attribute it to watching lots of Looney Tunes. You can’t go wrong with Bugs Bunny. No, you certainly cannot.

And I also watched a lot of old classic cinema. Sunday afternoons, that was the ritual with my mother, is we would watch, there was always a double feature on Sunday afternoons, and we would just sit and watch while the men were off playing cards or whatever it was, and the dishes were done, and we watched two classic films. Well, I mean, those classic films, they were very theatrical, in that it was almost like, camera stays here, things happen around it.

Yes, yes. And so I think that was the early soup, stew, swamp that was, that fostered that. A shy kid in the face of all of these things, and eventually I discovered punk rock when I was like 11, and the rest is history, as they say.

Did at any point before punk rock, did you do any theatre? Did you do any plays or anything, or were you too shy for that? Well, I was cast in a show when I was in grade four by my, grade five, grade five by my teacher, and I was horrified. I was literally the kid in class, you know, with the hair on their face, who like is like, oh, don’t look at me. I was that kid, and she cast me.

We were doing some version of like Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and I was cast as the princess, which is like the female lead, and I, you know, I was horrified. I literally was so terrified of this. Yeah.

And I had a moment, which I think a number of people in theatre have, where suddenly you’re out there, and you’re trembling, and you want to die, and something happens where there’s a response from the audience, and you’re like, what’s that now? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I, there’s a scene where I had to like, I had this like cardboard cutout of some kind of like urn of oil, and I had to pour it onto the thieves who were hiding in these other jars, and I made the sound effect. That’s all it was.

I literally was like, and there was a roaring laughter. And the idea that someone, especially who was very, you know, quiet, could have such a resonant impact on a group of people was surprising. And then I didn’t really do any other theatre beyond that in grade school at all.

It wasn’t until high school that I started. I took drama classes and did all of that stuff. But I will say, I went to French schools, and there were always classes about like, which is like, basically, we were introduced to, you know, musicians of Quebec, and actors, and dancers, and filmmakers, and really from a very early age, exposed to the idea of artists and their art.

Writers, poets, you name it. And I just think somehow this all really led to wanting to work in this field. So you were, you were raised in Quebec? It’s a bit of a mixed bag.

I was born in Ottawa, and so I did some schooling there, and then eventually I found myself in Montreal. There is, there is, I mean, we have to acknowledge that there’s a difference in the way that the Quebecois see their, the arts, and the way that English Canada sees the arts. And unfortunately, the Quebecois, well, good for them, not so good for us.

They tend to celebrate it in a way that we don’t, and celebrate the people who make it in a way that we don’t, which is unfortunate. I agree, I agree. And I would say when I initially was considering coming to Toronto, well actually, when I first started really working in the theatre as a director, when I first started doing my own work out there, there was a real interest in, I was largely exposed to a movement called La Relève, and that was a group of artists at the time who were the emerging experimental theatre makers, and it was like Wajdi Mouawad was part of that group, and Michel Monti, and Yvan Bienvenu, and Jean-Frédéric Messier, and you know, companies like Pigeon Internationale, and Carbone 14, like these really like doing work that you could not see on a day-to-day basis elsewhere in the country.

And so when I was doing work in English, I really felt like, is there a meeting place between what I’m seeing in those rooms, in the way that they work, in how they rehearse, and how they create material, and how they write plays, and the way I’ve been quote-unquote trained to create work in this Anglophone community, which was much more stage, right? It’s much more like you’ve got three weeks of rehearsal, and you you know, you block all your scenes, and I was like, that’s not me, and it’s not what I dreamed of making. And so the way that I did that is I started translating some of their work, and doing English versions of them, and figuring out where I lived between these two communities. And when I eventually, years later, when I moved to Toronto, I moved to Toronto to do my master’s at York in directing, and that was my whole pitch when I first got here.

I was like, I’m really interested in bringing these kinds of more imagistic, what we now refer to as devised approaches, and working with large casts to create new Canadian content. And the first piece that I did as a director at York is part of a project that was called at the time the Origins Project, where the directors are given two countries in the world to choose from, and you have to seek out either some myth or story from one of those countries, and you have five days, you’re handed a cast of undergrad actors, a mix of undergrad and master’s actors, and you have to create a new work in five days. And so I did my thing.

It was a dream come true. I was like, great. And the feedback I got was, we’re not sure we want to see any more of your Montreal imagistic feminist theatre here.

That was my first feedback moving to Ontario. Well, fuck. And the beauty of that is my assistant director made me a t-shirt that said just that.

And that’s kind of how it went from there. And I think since then, I’ve always been a very visual, layered, textured director, creator, educator, in terms of I like the details. I like the layers.

I believe all these elements are imperative, whether they’re design elements, or choreographic elements, or text elements, or character. So that’s kind of the broad story. How did you figure out that directing was something that you wanted to do? I knew I never wanted to be an actor.

I was never interested in acting. I never even tried to do it. It’s not like I tried to act, and it didn’t happen.

You were always directing as a thing. I didn’t know what it meant. And then when I was in high school, I was… Okay, so here’s the checkered path coming to life.

So I was asked to leave my parents home when I was 15. And so I was basically a homeless teenager. And I refused to, you know, like, proud Italian family, punk rock.

And I was like, I’m not going to beg for money. And so I got jobs and put myself through university and figured it out. But I started making theatre up there, because there were buskers out there, and I can’t sing a note to save my life.

So I was like, what am I going to do? So I started making theatre in the streets with other homeless teenagers, and did a bunch of shows. And then I eventually found out that my high school, or somewhere in that time period, I found out that the high school that I was at, had a budget for a formal play every year, but nobody had done one since I’d been there. So I went and said, okay, well, I want to do a play.

And I got like the three years worth of budget to do one show. And so I conceived of this piece loosely inspired by The Little Matchstick Girl, because of course, I have a, you know, I had a long standing self perception of being a misfit, whatever, a lost girl. And so I used that, and I kind of wrote this play.

And, and a friend from high school kind of helped write it, and we’ve tried to figure it out. And I was directing it without knowing that that was a job in the theatre. You know, and so I like, design the sets, and you know, and I kind of wrote this thing.

And I kind of told people what to do. And I know that a lot of people reduce directing to that. And of course, it, you know, it wasn’t about that per se, but it was like, how do we bring this to life? Like, this is the story, we kind of made it together.

And so that was the first time that I officially, I guess, directed without officially directing. So it started there. But I had seen theatre by then, like in high school, it was very regular for us to go see theatre, like any of the, the great companies from France that were coming in to do, you know, Moliere classics, on the big stages, like, we saw all of those.

And I just loved it. And it just felt like, it felt like home. It felt like belonging.

It felt like I understood the world before I knew anything about its rules or regulations. And it felt that I could have a voice there. Was there anything that let you know that you could, that this could be your life, that this could be your life’s work? Because a lot of a lot of people, I know so many people, they were like, they used to do theatre.

And then, you know, they went to the guidance counselor, and the guidance counselor said, oh, no, no, no, you should study business, or oh, no, no, no, no, you’re good at math, you should do math. And so they do math, and they’re, they’re okay at it. And they look back on theatre, because they never thought there was a life there.

There was, that it could be a thing that you did, for anything more than just fun. What was it that made you know that? I didn’t have a standard upbringing in that I was raised to be a wife, you know, in my childhood home. And so there wasn’t guidance in terms of your career, per se.

I mean, my mother was very good about like, you know, you’re very skilled in these ways. And you’re very smart, maybe you should be a lawyer, or a doctor, or, you know, like traditional successful jobs. But there wasn’t really a push towards that.

And I was out of there before it was really a question, you know? So I was really relying on my own ideas of the world. You know, like, I didn’t even know at that age that, like, people had to do taxes. Like, there was just no knowledge of how the world works, right? Like, as an adult, and that you’re supposed to kind of plan out a career.

So it seemed perfectly feasible. For me to just like, like the theatre and do it. Because there was nobody to really say otherwise.

Well, that’s the best way to go into it, quite frankly. I know. Blind faith.

Because you don’t, because in that case, there’s not, there hasn’t been, when you’re in your teenage years, there hasn’t been somebody who’s like, oh, I don’t know if you can do that. Absolutely not. No, I didn’t receive that at all.

You know, it was really up to me to shape my life as I saw fit. And, and it, that was it. Really, like, I could not be plainer about that answer.

That was really it. And certainly there have been moments in my career where I’m like, am I too old to retrain as that lawyer my mother suggested? I mean, I think we all like, so many people that I went to theatre school with don’t do it anymore. I agree.

I know. You know, and so many people that I went to theatre school with, um, maybe didn’t last two years out of theatre school. Because it’s tough.

It is extraordinarily difficult. Yeah. And some of them, like, they, you know, they gave it up and they gave it up entirely.

Like, they don’t even do it on the side anymore. They don’t, it’s a thing that they look back on as something that they used to do. Because I don’t think when you’re, like, we all went into theatre school, we were all like, 18, 19.

And so when they said it’s a hard life, we were like, yeah, for you, maybe. Yeah. You know, not realizing that once you hit 30, suddenly you wanted things.

You’re like, you’re like, oh, I’d like to eat more than ramen noodles. And I would like to not have a room, you know, all these things that you, you think that you want. And then some people start, the dominoes fall.

Yeah. Um, but also like, all of us who went through theatre school had to justify why we were going to theatre school to, to certain people, whether it was a guidance counselor, whether it was a parent or something like that. Um, as somebody who teaches theatre students, do you, do they, do you ever hear the stories of how they’ve struggled with justifying why they’re doing it? Of course I hear that.

I wouldn’t say a lot though. I mean, I think it’s, it goes through phases, right? It seems like we’ve been in a phase for some time now where if someone has chosen this, then the majority of their family seems to be supportive in a way I’ve never heard of in the past. Like that seems much more absolute than it used to be.

Whereas, you know, you go back even just five, seven years, there were definitely more people in, in, in a student’s life that were questioning their choice or their other friends, their non-theatre friends mocking their choice. Oh, sure. Oh, did you spend the day being a tree today? And yes.

And so I would say more before than now, I’ve certainly heard it. And you know, like the truth of it is, I’ve certainly had conversations in a classroom situation where I’m like, you know, whether or not you choose to do this for the rest of your life, if you continue to choose this every day and there comes a day where you don’t choose it, the thing is, is be sure to at least choose it today in its absolute form, you know, gain all that you can from the experience. Because it’ll contribute to everything else, ultimately.

And if we talk, you know, business talk, then soft skills go a long way. But yeah, I would say that talk is abating now. It’s not as prevalent as it used to be.

That’s good. Because when I went to my guidance counselor, my guidance counselor, when I was like, they’re like, you have to start thinking about university. I said, I don’t want university, I’m thinking about a college.

And they were like, oh, college. And so what is it that you want to do? And I said, I want to be an actor. And they said, not so good.

They were like, I don’t know. They were like, I don’t know how to deal with that. Yeah, you know.

So, you know, I figured it out on my own. But yeah, and I think a lot of us did. It’s great that that’s not happening so much for a lot of it.

It doesn’t seem to be. I mean, of course, there’s still, you know, there’s certainly students, I would say that if they’re questioning that it’s more their own question. You know, I think that there’s a different kind of awareness of it’s interesting when they, you know, when they’re beginning training, there’s, as always, less of an awareness of the real way that the industry actually works, as opposed to like, I’m going to be famous.

Yes. And, but I feel like there’s a savviness to a lot of people now. Excuse me, where there’s an understanding of like, there are no guarantees and that I’m making a choice in a difficult industry.

And that, you know, I think that there’s a different awareness of that with young actors or actors in training. I think that it, you know, whether it’s because that’s being introduced more by their instructors and curriculum is really providing a sense of perspective of, you know, how to go about this. And I’m not sure, you know, whether they’re, yeah, I’m not sure why, but there, there seems to be more of an awareness of like, okay, the dream is still as big as ever.

Of course it is. You know, the eyes are still shiny. But I would say that there’s a real sense of like, I get the question of a lot of like, can I really make a living? I get that question from people like, can you make a guaranteed living? And of course the answer is no.

Yeah. Right. And then where do you go from there? You try to, you know, find those points of discussion of what their passion is for this and how do they imagine it? And how does that compare to what they’ve actually gone out and seen and what they’ve discovered about the industry and which part of the industry do you want to work in and in which city? And, you know, I like, I try to really make sure that they’re aware of the fact that every city has a theatre scene, as opposed to feeling like, well, Toronto’s the hub and it’s the only place.

Toronto’s a great place to be. It’s a great scene, but it’s not the only one. Yeah.

And, and I think it’s important to experience theatre in other cities and other countries, you know, to get a real sense of what your voice is ultimately going to be and the kind of work you really want to do. It’s so interesting because there’s some people that I know who’ve been doing, doing, you know, been in the theatre for years, who started off as like, I’m an actor and now they’re an actor slash a fight choreographer, an actor slash intimacy director, they’re an actor slash so many things. And so we’re all hyphenates now.

We’re all like survival. Well, it’s all like, we’re all like, we all take all of our skills and like, how do we, in the way that so many entrepreneurs do? Because, you know, I think that a lot of people are starting to think of themselves as entrepreneurs as well as artists. And, you know, what are all of my skills? How, how, what, how can I put all of these things together to make a career in this? Yes, I have many hyphenates.

You know, I work as a director. I work as an acting coach. I’ve worked as an acting coach for theatre.

I work on set as an acting coach. I’ve actually coached film directors on how to work with actors. I’ve done wardrobe design in theatre, film, special events, red carpets.

I’ve dressed celebrities. I’ve dressed rock stars. I’ve dressed, you know, like I’ve done dramaturgy.

I’ve done script editing, you know, like you name it, I’ve probably done it at some point or other. Yeah. And of course, because the truth is, is you can’t always survive on the one thing that you may do.

And I think it’s also that a lot of us love the theatre. Yeah. And if it means getting to do something else in the theatre, fine by me, fine by us.

Like, oh, I have a passion for that. That’s great. I’ll happily do that.

Absolutely. Yeah. So getting to the teaching, when did you start teaching and what made you want to? When I got into my master’s, I was given classes.

And I, well, to be fair, when I was in my undergrad, I had an amazing instructor for a Canadian theatre history class. And at the time, I was actually already working in the industry. I was working at Playwrights Workshop Montreal because I was determined to get in there.

And so as it turns out, all the people we were studying, or not all, but a number of the people we were studying in this Canadian theatre history class, I was interacting with at work on a regular basis. And this was very exciting. So this instructor was always like, tell us some stories, Rosanna, like tell us about what it’s like to work with these people directly.

And what have you learned about what dramaturgy is and et cetera. And so she actually would let me take over some of the classes. And that was great fun for me.

And it was just exciting to share that with friends of mine, like my ensemble, my team of people. And then when I, like I said, when I did my master’s, I was given some classes to do. And I, you know, I didn’t really see much difference in some ways between directing and teaching.

I felt like there was enough common ground that I was like, it just feels like directing in some ways. And I guess I did well by that. So that way I was ultimately hired when I finished my master’s, when I graduated, I was hired to teach at York.

I did my master’s at York and was hired literally to teach their third and fourth year creative ensemble classes. So I was the instructor on those courses. It was great.

And I did that for, I think after my master’s, I did that for an additional five years. The other thing that happened when I graduated from my master’s, Ron Singer was the, had been the chair of the, the head of the master’s program, grad studies. And he and I had worked together quite a bit.

He had hired me to assist him in teaching some of his classes. And we had a lot of kinship in terms of our belief of what was necessary in the theatre and what training an actor could mean. And I was starting to figure this out with him in part.

And he was the artistic director of the Randolph Academy at that time. So on convocation, the day that I graduated, I received a message at home and I literally started teaching at Randolph the very next day and came in and taught a class and assisted Ron in a couple of classes and then taught a couple of classes. And within, I think two terms, I think it was, I became the head of the acting division.

And there were jokes at a certain point in time back then, where it was like the Rosanna Academy for the performer, because I was just, you know, I was given the opportunity to really teach and to help develop the curriculum at that time for the acting division. And yeah, Ron entrusted me with a lot of teaching at the time and it was great. We were able to really work together to forge a curriculum, which was reflective of the industry at that time to ensure that students had what we perceived, of course, to be the necessary skills to be viable in the industry, to be, you know, thinking like solid critical analysis skills, interpretive skills, a sense of their impulses and instincts, a good emotional life, et cetera, physical, vocal, and so on and so on.

We know there’s a million things required, but that, you know, there was a solid foundation there by which they could enter the industry, have a sense of who they were, the beginnings of who they were going to be as artists in that industry. And it was great fun. It was a really great time.

Hard work, obviously, long hours, crazy hours. I remember we used to be in a building off of Yonge Street and we had a building on that side street and another set of classrooms were on Yonge Street. And I remember there were days where I would teach like, you know, till a certain hour and have 10 minutes and have to run up the street to the other building, teach for like three hours, run back to the next building.

And I would just do that all day long and for days in a row. But I learned so much then. It was an incredible, incredible opportunity between those two schools, between York and Randolph, to really set a precedent for the kind of instructor I could be.

So you were building a curriculum at Randolph from the beginning. And, you know, you mentioned how you were trying to, you know, put together the skills that an actor would need coming out of school. How did that change? How did those skills change from when you started teaching at Randolph to when you finished? Like there’s the industry changes and what the industry wants and the way the industry operates changes over time.

Is there anything that you can put your finger on as to how things change? It’s a very difficult question because in some ways this is a very intuitive and experiential, you know, you make those those choices based on your direct experience or my direct experience working as a director in that industry or, you know, it’s, these things are very interrelated. Because my honest answer is that in some ways not much has changed, right? You still really, like I still am very driven by the idea of the belief that it’s not about the talent, quote unquote, that you might come in with, but it’s the growth ratio. It’s what you do with it over time.

That it’s about honesty, finding conviction in the truth of a given story through empathy and through generosity. Using what you know about life but not using your personal diary. Gaining perspective on the world and how other people view things and live and trying to understand that other customs, points of view, perceptions.

Understanding something about psychological and emotional makeup of human beings. Learning how to embrace fallibility. The Achilles heel of us all which sometimes makes for the best theatre.

Very true, very true. So in some ways like those things that I feel are really essential are not really different. I think that somehow there are elements of the training that have changed I think there was a focus at a certain point in time and for a period of time on really developing a high polished machine of an actor.

Do you know who can come in and be very clean and very, very flawless. Better not snap the fingers into the mic. That’s all right.

You know, really a finished package and I think we’re on some level moving towards a less finished and more intuitive package. I think both those things, abilities are necessary. Honestly like and I don’t believe like just because things are moving in this direction that the other skills fall away in terms of what’s necessary for training.

So yeah I would say that’s kind of the movement of the last 10 years in very obviously general terms. Other things have happened but if I had to say the standouts it would say this transition from very product polished oriented actor training to much more who am I, what do I have to say ensemble devised moods and feelings honoring yourself which is not bad. None of this is bad but it’s moving towards this instinct driven thing, a thing, you know process.

So I would say that that’s probably the biggest transition. It’s interesting when I was in theatre school back in 1990, I was at Georgetown College at the time. We were in this tiny warehouse at the corner of King and River that’s gone now through condo now and we were you know being taught that our career was going to be audition for the job, get the job, audition for the job, get the job, audition for the job, get the job.

There was never any talk of self-producing. In fact there were a couple of times I recall somebody saying well you know if you know maybe that doesn’t work here maybe you could do a solo show at Fringe or something like it was like the lowest possible thing was to do a Fringe show or a solo show. But that’s changed so much now and I’m looking at the for example the George Brown faculty and there’s somebody who’s teaching self-producing which is which is relatively new and there’s been this whole like shift in that knowing how to self-produce is kind of a necessary skill in this day and age.

Is that something that you’ve seen at Randolph as well or that you saw here? Yes I mean definitely. You know in part that was the great thing about just flipping back to York like that was the great thing about creative ensemble at that time is those courses because I also got to develop curriculum there were designed to helping students who came as actors or writers or would-be directors or educators even figure out what theatre is and creating new forms of theatre and so that was great and I had that background. I’d also done a lot of creative ensemble.

I did work in Quebec and when I got to Randolph there wasn’t necessarily that same kind of room within the classroom per se initially but there were always outside of curriculum events so there was always coffee houses or you know students would get together and develop their own work literally in-house and be able to showcase it in various forums. There were student driven groups that I got to mentor at Randolph that were about dramaturgy or playwriting or new play creation or whatever it is and to this day we still have coffee houses here that go on where students get to showcase either you know existing material but done through their own initiative interpreted through their own initiative or sometimes new created pieces so that does still exist here and has continued to exist here so it’s been around I think from the beginning which is really nice and there’s always been talk of that. There used to be classes here that were about creating your own solo show and so you’d have an entire term where you would work on developing your own piece and interestingly enough one of the grads from this program from a few years back went on and has become actually a professional clown, has done lots of her own solo creations, has really like it literally led it became a catalyst to her whole career identity as a performer which is really nice.

So I think that kind of thing is imperative and I’m glad it’s happening more often. Yeah me too. One of the things that often comes up when we talk about theatre schools and things like that is there are certain challenges and some of them came to light in the past year or so.

People writing about particular experiences they’ve had at different theatre schools and things like that of the process of and I don’t know if this happens anymore because I haven’t been in theatre school a long time but the idea of we need to break you down and build you back up and what I always found in my own class and talking to other people is that there was a lot of breaking you down not a whole lot of building you back up so the whole thing was like very one-sided where you were sort of torn down and weakened a little bit and then thrust out into the world without that last half of the of the of the package happening. Did you see any of that when you were teaching? Did you like did you fight against that? I have, I certainly have. I mean I know that that has existed.

I don’t perceive myself to be that kind of instructor. I don’t believe in that way of working. Have I seen it? Absolutely.

I’ve seen it when I was a student myself. I you know and I’ve seen it beyond that. I would say that I would say it still happens in general at you know various theatre schools across this country.

I think there’s still that ideology is still upheld by some artist educators or educators. I’ve never felt it was useful. I think it’s dangerous and I think it’s I think it’s about power.

Oh yeah absolutely. I just think it’s I think it’s unfortunate. I think so too and I agree that it’s about power.

I think it’s definitely about power. I always found when I was at George Brown there was always the every semester you’d find you have the meeting between yourself the artistic director and the head of acting and they would basically decide if you were going to stay with them. And many of us who were not the four golden children spent every day of our time at theatre school in fear that we would do the wrong thing and that we would then be asked to leave because we did the wrong thing.

Which is not particularly a great way to spend a creative time is to be in fear. But again I think I feel like that was a little bit about power as well to keep us off balance. And there are sad side effects to that kind of that kind of thing where we’re taught not to rock the boat and we’re taught not to speak up.

I agree. And that ends up with unfortunate consequences in some of the larger theatres in the country. Yes I totally agree.

I think there’s a lot of reasons why people are believe they have to keep their mouth shut. I think there’s a lot of different reasons for that. I agree that that certain kinds of pressure act in opposition to what they ideally could or should maybe.

You know for me I think it’s important for a student to understand that their effort is required. Their participation is required. And that they have to wrangle with their challenges.

And that there’s something very empowering actually about being like okay I’m not great at this but I need to kind of figure out what I can do. What is my version of this? And having deadlines and having expectations I think has to exist. I think if we eliminate that all together it becomes problematic in a whole other territory.

But I agree if it’s being held as some kind of carrot that is where it goes wrong absolutely. And I agree that if favoritism is shown that that is a problem. You know how do you solve that? You know a grand sweep of the industry.

I mean that’s the… But who decides? Well that’s the thing. That is the thing. Who does decide? Yeah like there’s an instructor in Quebec who I worked with as a student who I had a tremendous experience with.

Who I know other people had a very contrary experience with. And I’m like if I had to decide I’d keep them. But you know if I hear this information I’m like well what is that? Is that perception? You know like it opens up some horrible questions and a much bigger discussion that I don’t know.

You know like I think in an educational institution it absolutely is the responsibility to help students understand that discipline is required to work in an industry like this one which is unpredictable. But I think that that doesn’t need to be taught through this kind of standardized ultimatum etc. Yeah.

As a teacher and somebody who’s taught students for a while, what’s your favourite part about teaching? I’m going to give away a kind of secret. Okay. This is horrible.

So it’s kind of the same thing that’s my favourite thing when I’m directing. Is that sometimes if you do things like, it’s not the right way of saying this, but kind of well enough, the actor believes they did it all by themselves. And they’re like what if blah blah blah.

And you’re like yes. And they come to this realization where they can really own themselves as an artist and a creator and a participant. And then their voice really starts to, you get to be partners in crime.

You get to be like a team in that sense. And in a way it’s the same thing with students. Where it’s like okay I’m going to give you a bunch of ways in which you can achieve this.

But when they finally put it together, hmm, I don’t know. It’s just like it’s through the looking glass. Do you know? It’s like yeah.

I say this story a lot, but it’s like a thousand years ago when I first started in this industry. I remember hearing this interview with, and I can’t remember which, but one of the Redgrave sisters was talking about, the other Redgrave sister, about what she liked so much about her work. And she was like, regardless of what character she plays, she always seems to be in this state of transformation, of rapture.

And I remember that description. I heard that when I was a late teen. And being like, I always want to make stuff like that.

I was like I want everything to feel that way. And so I think when a student really realizes that it’s not about perfection and it’s not about right, and it’s not about the idea of the work, but it’s really them as the channel, the live circuit to where humanity can share a little bit of itself, then something of what it means to be human, then you are really in that state of wonder. Learning that you don’t have to be right all the time, especially in the rehearsal hall, is one of those difficult challenges.

Because you always want to, especially when we’re really young, we think that it has to be perfect out of the box. I’ve felt that way for so long about writing. First go, first draft, oh that’s shit, I’m going to throw that out.

Which is not a great way to go about things. But you have to learn that you build on it. And that if you make a mistake, that’s an opportunity.

So difficult to learn at first. Yeah, I remember the first time a teacher said to me that it’s okay for a director to say, I don’t know. And I was like, what? What does this mean? What is this cryptic messaging? And I’m like, oh, I don’t have to know everything.

This is why it’s not about when you’re teaching somebody, it’s not about like, I am the teacher and I have this magic vault of all the information you need to be successful in your field. And I may not always be able to get you there. I may not be able, all I can do is provide tools and make suggestions.

And you will take those tools and do with what you will. And I may not know in this moment, what do you have to contribute? And that it can be really a relationship that is shared in terms of expanding that training and that experience. Yeah, I don’t believe in perfection.

And I think that, honestly, you can’t make theatre if you’re stuck on perfection, because theatre is about human beings who are nowhere near perfect. It’s also so many, I mean, the making of theatre is so many layers of people. Yes.

It is such a collaboration. Yeah. And not every collaboration happens in the room.

There’s a playwright who writes some words and a director who interprets those and actors who also interpret those. And there’s a designer who interprets things. There’s so many interpretations that all have to come together.

And because we’re all people working on the thing, you just have to work with whatever you get, kind of. Yes. But I think it’s about creating an environment in which someone feels empowered enough and secure enough and willing enough to take the risks, to take a leap of faith, to try, to not be afraid of trying.

There is no try. There’s only do. Yes, yes, yes.

But there’s lots of try, I think, in a theatre. It has to be that. And that really, all the people have to agree to that set of rules, that it is a sacred space, literally going back to the beginning of my conversation with you, where anything is possible.

And that includes the possibility that we can really work together to create something spectacular, as long as we agree that this is a safe space where we are committed to telling these stories. Yeah, yeah. So we’ve talked about your favourite thing about teaching.

What is the biggest challenge to teaching acting? Um, biggest challenge. It, you know, the thing that drives me a little bit nuts. I’m just gonna be honest.

Yeah, yeah. It’s that thing of like, okay, so I don’t know, it’s that thing of like, a lack of initiative on something that’s really easy. Do you know, it’s like, okay, so read this and then give back to me.

And it’s like, okay, did you read it? Oh, no, I didn’t read it. Why didn’t you read it? Do you know, like, it’s that, it’s that thing of like, something that seems fairly simple. And that for whatever reason, there’s a boundary to achieving that, you know, whether it’s self imposed on the part of that individual, or whether, you know, like, and I find that part hard, that thing of like, navigating that, like, I can see that you can see, you know, we’re so close, but, and that last moment, right, that last moment of reserve, that that hole, that obstacle, whatever it might be, I find that part hard, you know, it’s like, it’s like, it’s maybe it’s the fear, maybe the fear that, you know, is that, because it’s scary.

Of course, it is. It’s all scarier when you get close to it. Yeah, like, it’s, it’s less scary when you go through and actually try it and make that choice and do that thing.

Then when you’re just on the threshold, to try that choice or play that character in that way, or whatever it is, you know, absolutely, because I feel like we’re always afraid of the thing that means something to us. Yeah, a lot. And so what is a really comfortable way to say that you get the idea that when we’re on the cusp of it, we’re almost like our lizard brain says, No, I can’t.

No, I can’t. Yeah. Because what if we fail? That’s right.

But if we don’t, then it’s so much better. Yeah, you know, I like the idea of spectacular disasters. Like I, you know, my whole life has been prepping me for that.

And so, you know, I like, I, I love the faults, right. And I think that that perfectionism, that fear of like, as you’re saying of right and yeah, maybe that’s what drives me the most notes about teaching the rest of it. I’m pretty good.

But nice, you know, I mean, I would say, technically, the ever changing computer systems and programs on how to load. I mean, that’s just that is just the logistics of like, I’m a bit of a carrier pigeon slash, you know, a really old school person. So you prefer you kind of prefer like paper and stuff.

And yeah, paper, I still keep an agenda on paper. I have it with me. Like, I have this, you know, fancy phone that does all of this stuff.

I don’t know how it achieves such a thing. I really, I really was built to be, you know. Do you do I mean, aside from the, the different systems that schools give us and give you to work with, do you find that there’s other technologies that are we’re using in the theatre that you just like, I don’t know why we have to do that? No, just mostly like your agenda and your phone or Yeah, no, I’m really open to new technologies and new ideas, right? Like I, I think that it is important.

I don’t think this happens enough to really question what is theatre today? What is theatre in Canada today? What is theatre in Toronto today? I don’t think people ask these questions enough. I think that there’s, you know, and the same is true. I mean, this may be a bit dangerous to say, but it’s like, we have these big theatre companies with these big budgets and they, you know, and they, they have some measure of freedom to experiment and try things out.

But on some level, it’s like, what is the, what does the next wave look like? What does the next version of theatre look like? And what can it be? And so, no, so I’m very open, you know, like, even though, although I’m dating myself now, which I thoroughly resent, there may have been a wave I hear about in the 80s, where there was a lot of like multimedia, and some of it was really terrible, right? Like, even then, even before we really knew what it was. And you could tell, it was like, that’s really cheesy, or that’s really bad, and it looks bad. But it still was a group of people or a movement that was starting to question how to tell stories in different ways.

I think we should always do that. I don’t think we should ever get too comfortable with what this art form is. It’s been evolving over centuries.

So, I do think that, you know, you’re talking about these big companies, and they’ve got like, they’ve got grants, they’ve got the money, they have the room to explore. The problem is that I think in a lot of cases, you get stuck with the idea that, oh, but this has to be a success. And so, if we’re not selling a certain number of tickets, because we have our subscribers to think about, we have this, and we have that, so we have, there’s a certain amount of playing it safe that ends up happening in some of those theaters, in a lot of those theaters.

I would imagine that that happens. I think there’s an enormous, there must be an enormous amount of pressure to deliver sold out shows or above a certain box office. And yes, for sure.

I think that’s, I think that’s fortunate in that there are some shows that come out that are great. And I think it’s unfortunate because I am very, I’m very passionate about next generation, and new work. And, you know, and even like, even mid-career artists that are working, that aren’t in the top 10, you know, and that are doing material, which is not that.

And I think there should be room on our, quote unquote, larger stages, or more, you know, established stages for these kinds of works. And allowing the public to access these, and not just at Fringe, though Fringe is great. But what happens if you take a show like that? And I know it happens on occasion.

But I mean, it’s pretty rare that it happens. I mean, there’s some notable exceptions. Yes.

But it was part of a season, you know, like, here are three big ass. Oh, sorry. I swear a lot.

And I was being good there. So I should have told you the beginning. Yeah, I almost blew out a whole slew of swear words just because.

So like, here are three like main stage pieces, even if you’re giving them necessarily the main stage, but you’re giving them a public forum, you know, that has the name behind it, that has the backing, even if you don’t give it a full budget, even if you don’t give it, you know, but that it’s there. And that we’re, you know, we’re allowing audiences to actually, you know, ingest some of this other kind of work, these other stories. Yeah, I think that, you know, that to me is ideal.

Sure. Yeah. That’s the ideal case scenario.

Hmm. No, absolutely. Well, we’re almost out of time.

So this has been a lot of fun. I really want to thank you for doing this. It’s been fun for me too.

Thank you. Awesome. This has been a Homebody Productions production.