SETTING THE VIRTUAL STAGE
Studios move acting classes online
The last acting class at Haven Studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood felt different to acting coach Benjamin Ratner.
“We had this powerful, profound class. We always have a good class, but what struck me was it was vibrating at another level,” Ratner said about the class of a dozen or so people on March 15.
Ratner, also a director/writer/ producer/actor, said that after the class he wondered what was next in the new COVID-19 times. Then he got an email from his student Timothy Paul Coderre.
Coderre said that he would see Ratner again in a couple of months, “hopefully.”
That gave Ratner some pause, as he knew Coderre, a retired Canadian Army major who had been deployed in Somalia and the Congo, and was a consultant for the World Bank in the Congo and Rwanda, knew a thing or two about things like pandemics.
“He knew what was coming, and that email was kind of a wake-up call for me because I knew this guy had a lot of experience dealing with situations like this in Third World countries,” said Ratner, who opened Haven Studio in 2002.
The next day, the curtain came down on Hollywood North and 42 TV and film productions were shuttered. Live theatre was also closed. Productions still remain closed as the industry is navigating the B.C. government’s Restart Plan. People are hoping for some return to business in June, but many are expecting the fall will be a more likely scenario.
When sheltering in place became the reality in mid-march, Ratner and other local acting programs pivoted quickly, putting together online classes via Zoom. It soon became clear that the classes were as much about community as they were about the craft.
“I never imagined myself teaching classes online. I have seen online classes and everything and I’ve been sort of skeptical about them, but I have never done them. And then when the COVID situation forced us to shut down our studio about a week later, I knew we needed to keep going. We needed a place to sort of maintain our community and our creativity, and keep our sort of family together,” said Ratner, who has students tuning in from Vancouver, Washington state, Los Angeles, Australia and the U.K.
One of those foreign students is Gwenm Carsley, who is taking classes from London. A Vancouver resident, Carsley got stuck in the U.K. after a holiday turned into both her and her stepmother contracting the coronavirus. Carsley was sick for a month and her stepmother was hospitalized. Both are fine now.
“I didn’t know how the online class would work, but I’m loving it. It’s become a very healing space,” said Carsley, who has been a student at Haven Studio for seven years. “I thought working virtually would feel awkward, that the screen would be an obstacle to connecting authentically and act like a kind of veil of disconnect in the work, but you can see everyone so close up, the subtleties aren’t lost at all.
“In fact, there is actually something very intimate, connected and even profound and visceral about the online experience. This global isolation has really highlighted the need for human connection, so these classes are proving to be a form of a lifeline.”
A lifeline as well as a home base, according to 35-year teaching veteran Andrew Mcilroy of Mcilroy and Associates.
“A lot of my students are bartenders and waiters and that sort of stuff, and I just didn’t want it to all end for them,” Mcilroy said about his pupils, some Zooming in from as far away as New Zealand. “I need to keep the clubhouse open.”
Mcilroy and Ratner have both drawn inspiration for class content from the coronavirus crisis and have picked material that’s socially relevant for the times.
“This sounds sort of Byzantine, but I asked all my students to go and find a first-person, primary source narrative of a past pandemic,” said Mcilroy, adding that other man-made or natural disasters have been called upon as source material as well. “It’s all social science. All of my students went out and they had to find these primary-source narratives from people who had witnessed tsunamis and that sort of stuff because we were ideally set up to embrace the words of other people who were living through uncertain times.
“We realized we were open to embrace these words of people who had actually gone through similar situations when their world has been turned upside down.”
Mcilroy’s classes have also been reading from the Governor General’s Award-winning play Unity (1918). The play by Kevin Kerr — first produced at The Cultch in 2001 — is a gothic romance packed with dark comedy.
“We started by doing monologues from films and plays that are relevant to the state of the world today. For example, Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of (1940’s) The Great Dictator, with lines like: ‘The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never parish,’” said Ratner.
“We are also working on Peter Finch’s meltdown from the 1976 film Network (recently done on Broadway with Brian Cranston), with the famous words: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’”
At the Vancouver Film School (VFS), things have also been a little bit different.
VFS pivoted to online courses (the ones that could go online as classes like combat training and performance-capture acting don’t work over a video call) and workshops for their 140 acting-department students.
“We weren’t feeling we could deliver the full robust program of hands-on training and that frankly is why students have chosen to come to VFS. So we’ve made a bit of a shift,” said Jennifer Clement, head of the VFS acting department. “We wanted to keep the integrity of our program, so what we have gone on to do is what we are calling an ‘engaged pause,’ at the moment. So, the things we need to deliver in person we are going to deliver when we can reopen. So, right now we are working with our students and teaching different kinds of workshops that are effective online. They’ve been working on monologues. They’ve been working on scenes. They’ve been working on text analysis.”
VFS has held online workshops with industry guests including Christopher Guest, Matthew Lillard, Alison Wright and Kevin Smith.
So, when the industry does reopen, what can these actors expect to face? For starters, a lot of changes. Clement points to things like the disappearance of the traditional craft-services table and the crowded hair and makeup trailer as elements that will no longer exist in the new reality. There will also be fewer face-to-face meetings, and actors will be auditioning more often via video.
A lot of my students are bartenders and waiters and that sort of stuff, and I just didn’t want it to all end for them. I need to keep the clubhouse open.