Turning stages into classrooms for budding artists
In these Wednesday Matinée columns, Carly Maga and I write about noteworthy things happening on GTA stages: new productions, talents who have caught our eye, changes in the performing arts landscape.
This week, the focus is on something that underlies all of these activities but which audiences may not often think about: theatre training. Several events this month bring education and mentorship into the public eye — and this is also an opportune moment to check in with one of the city’s most high-profile training programs, the Soulpepper Academy, to find out if and when it may return from its hiatus.
Founded 18 years ago as a festival of five short plays by artists under 21, the Paprika Festival has grown into an organization supporting young and emerging artists year-round. It runs six programs focusing on different aspects of theatre-making, from playwriting to administration. This year’s activities culminate in a performance festival (May 20 to 26) at Native Earth Performing Arts’ Aki Studio in Regent Park.
Artistic producer Ali Joy Richardson describes Paprika as a “small boat that can turn a lot faster than the big ship of an institution” and celebrates its “one size fits one” approach: each of the 22 participants this year had a program tailored for them, from “content through to logistics,” Richardson says. “We’re not asking them to fit a model that we’ve created.”
A focus for the past six years or so at Paprika has been ensuring that its programs are accessible across demographics. All Paprika programs are free of charge, most of participants’ transit is paid for, and food is frequently provided at meetings. The organization recently expanded the age range of its Directors Lab and Indigenous Arts program up to 30.
Paprika’s seven staff members are all under 30 and many of them came to these positions after having gone through one of its programs. Leadership stints at Paprika tend to be brief, says Richardson: While the jobs are supposedly part-time, they’re full of “behind-the-scenes invisible hustle” that’s exhausting but gratifying.
Cole Forrest, 20, who was part of Paprika’s Productions program last year, is part of the 2019 Indigenous Arts program and, after this year’s festival, will take on the newly created position of Indigenous program co-ordinator. “It’s a very unique thing, Paprika,” says Forrest, who is Nipissing Ojibwe. “If you’re under 30, and if you feel you’re in a good place artistically, they’ll support that … if you’ve not found the goodness in your work, they’ll help you find that, too.”
The proximity in age and experience between Paprika’s leadership and its participants is part of an “ideological shift toward recognizing … teachers as future collaborators,” Richardson says. This is in contrast to her personal experience as theatre student: “I thought, my God, in this classroom if I don’t win this person over, that could end my career.”
This sentiment provides a useful bridge to some of the concerns that sparked the Got Your Back Acting Educators’ Conference, being held at Tarragon Theatre on May 27 and 28. Got Your Back Canada is an advocacy and support organization that started up in response to #MeToo and the conference will provide training, experience sharing and community building for university and college acting teachers, independent acting coaches and other educators. The conference’s three main focus areas reflect topical concerns in education today: harassment, intimacy and consent; mental health of students and teachers; and anti-oppression, diversity and inclusion.
Notably, this conference is driven by artist/teachers who work as sessional instructors rather than by full-time university or college educators (I declare my interest in these issues as a full-time associate professor of dramatic arts at Brock University). In the observation of co-organizer Jennifer Wigmore, “60 to 80 per cent of the course load of any theatre program I know of is being taught by part-time instructors,” and in her experience that means little to no training from the hiring institution.
Wigmore, who has taught acting and visual art for over 15 years at many of the city’s universities and colleges, is worried about “the lack of oversight” for sessional instructors in theatre programs. Teaching and acting are two different things, she points out: “If you want to make teaching an adjunct to your career, you should take it seriously and add extra skills.” Having earned an MFA in acting with an emphasis on teaching at York University, conference co-organizer Neil Silcox took on sessional contracts at Brock, the University of Toronto and Sheridan College and “started running into places where I could see gaps in my understanding of how to teach, particularly how to handle students who need extra care.”
Silcox ran his own acting educators conference last summer for about 30 participants, and has now joined forces with Wigmore and Niki Landau for this year’s conference, which they expect will be around three times the size of Silcox’s 2018 gathering.
In preparation for this year’s event, the organizers undertook a nationwide survey of some 65 acting instructors and nearly 500 former acting students. Silcox shared some of their preliminary findings, which reveal a need for diversification and better communication in acting training programs. About half the students said they’d not had a teacher from a historically minoritized community; about half said they’d never studied a non-western approach to performance; and only one in five student respondents said they understood how they were being evaluated.
The survey is also throwing up red flags around mental health support for students: “Fifty per cent of student respondents said they didn’t have easy access to mental health systems,” Silcox says, which is particularly worrying in a field in which students frequently are put in situations that challenge them emotionally and psychologically. Some 70 per cent of students surveyed said they felt they were under threat of elimination from their degree program at any time.
“That means students are less likely to speak up” if they’re asked to do something that they’re not entirely comfortable with, Silcox says.
There’s also a lot of thinking about theatre training going on at Soulpepper Theatre, which put its celebrated academy on hiatus last year in the wake of institutional crisis. The fact that academy members learn from members of the Soulpepper ensemble and are cast in and work behind the scenes on its productions provides an important bridge into professional theatre, and the academy’s absence has become notable on the Toronto theatre scene.
Good news, then, that while a certain level of funding and resources still need to be achieved, Soulpepper’s executive director Emma Stenning confirms that “we are absolutely committed to the academy returning in its new iteration,” with a first cohort coming on line in 2020 or 2021.
A particular concern, Stenning says, is ensuring that “the academy is fully reflective of artists who are emerging in Canada, how it is providing for the inevitable plurality of their careers,” which are likely to include television and film as well as theatre acting, and newer kinds of work including motion capture for gaming. The Paprika Festival runs May 20-26 at Native Earth Performing Arts, 585 Dundas St. W; tickets at paprikafestival.com and 416-531-1402. Information and registration for the Got Your Back Acting Educators Conference is available at gybactingeducators.com.