Intermission Magazine: The artists on this call were candid and vulnerable. They spoke openly about their professional frustrations and challenges — and they weren’t shy about pinpointing the ways that mainstream anglophone Canadian theatre practices fail directors and artists more broadly.
That said, I didn’t leave our chat feeling hopeless or cynical. Instead, I felt reinvigorated to jump back into my own artistic practice, explore in-between zones of experimentation, and be as bold as these five directors strive to be in every room they enter.
2 comments:
One quote out of this article really caught my attention due to the fact that I have heard it before, and this article and its content just further supports what I have heard. The quote in question is the one that references the importance of informal conversations with talent, designers, or other professionals. I have been told my many people in the industry of live entertainment that sometimes the most important conversation and the most important information come out of the most informal of conversations. There are so bit of information that one can learn and only so many of those can be learned in official meetings the rest then must be learned in informal meetings or passing conversations. This is especially true when you are working with someone who has been in any industry for a long time. They have had so many experiences over the course of their career that small things can be the trigger for a bit of information that they can pass along, but without that trigger in a random moment you may never get that nugget of information.
Reading this article, not as someone with any interest in directing, I was courteous what taek aways I would have from it. Surprisingly, they talked about a lot of issues that were pervasive not just in directorial creative spaces, but in theatre education as a whole. Of which, I realized how influential having a more varied background in Undergrad has been. Specifically, in their conversation they discuss wanting to impress upon their students the importance of Networking, Specificity, Grant writing, and Management. These were all things that, while I don't have a strong background in, I have some familiarity with as I did take classes that included these topics, as part of my Business Administration Minor. I’ve always kind of seen it as a hurdle to get over, that my undergrad theatre program wasn't more rigorous. However, when I look back now, it allowed me the opportunity to take a wider variety of classes and double major and minor.
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