Introduction: Why Acting Training?

There has been for some time now a feeling that a study should be done of theatre training in Canada ...

—Malcolm Black, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Theatre Training in Canada

The matter of “why think about acting training in English-speaking Canada” is motivated by a number of factors. First of all, it is of concern to us because acting training is part of our professional engagement as teachers and as artists: staging this kind of national-level conversation is a means by which we can continue to discuss and collaborate with colleagues and peers on matters which occupy us in the classroom, rehearsal hall, and faculty meetings. We share concerns about key challenges that we feel are facing acting training in Canada and desire to clarify the terrain of these challenges as well as imagine ways through and beyond them.

The question of “diversities” has served as an umbrella term to organize some of that thinking, as current challenges seem to revolve around certain monolithic realities that would appear to be blocking the development of acting training in English-speaking Canada—particularly those relating to a relative absence of diversity in institutional approaches to aesthetics, to questions of gender and sexuality, and to the realities of racialization and ethnic minoritization. Responses to issues of diversity are profoundly polarized in our experience as may be noted in all of the following discussions and, as such, are presented here as indicators of a more fractured set of perspectives which we believe is worth exploring. While our short essay at the end of this issue comprises a series of provocations and possibilities for moving beyond the restrictions that are noted and resisted in the various conversations that form the backbone of this issue, this brief introduction aims to map the terrain of impasse that we feel constitutes a significant amount of the acting training occurring in the country.

The crux of why we feel acting training is worthy of serious and ongoing discussion can be boiled down to the following rather straightforward articulation: if actors can—in the best of circumstances—serve an integral role in the imagining and execution of the stories we tell ourselves and by which we come to understand ourselves both individually and collectively, then it is essential that they both understand the significance of their work and bring an extensive array of creative and conceptual offerings to the rehearsal hall, studio, or whatever other place of work in which they find themselves. Over a number of years we have initiated a series of public conversations around the question of the past, current state, and future of acting training in English-speaking Canada. These debates have occurred at gatherings such as the City of Wine Festival, Magnetic North Festival, and meetings of the Canadian Association of Theatre Research.

More recently, in preparation for this issue we have used technology to mediate national conversations between a wide range of professionals whose careers lie at the intersections of education, training, and the professional theatre. Participants were approached based on the range of their experience, their perspectives and convictions, and their ability to communicate to a wide variety of audiences. Most importantly, we wanted to gather a mix of representative individuals prepared to move beyond potentially reductive orthodoxies currently impacting the profession. We recognize and embrace the polemical flavour of our approach to the matter in part because we feel the stakes are high not just for our institutions of training but also for the broader cultural landscape. We have found that proceeding via “provocations” has served to stimulate debate, to encourage our colleagues to refine and extend their thinking with an increasingly complex dialecticism in the context of live discussion, and to promote equally practical and intensely visionary solutions for the future. We also received over 200 responses to a questionnaire directed at graduates that we distributed via colleagues and associations across the country. We have drawn from these for the comments from graduates peppered throughout the issue.

It is important to note that the panel discussions presented in this issue are deeply redacted transcriptions of much longer...