Quick note here while I’m in between classes:
If you’re planning on auditioning for the University College Drama Program at UofT for next year, you must follow these instructions before March 13, 2009.
Tell everyone you know who is interested, because if you don’t get the forms in before that date, it gets a lot more complicated to be considered. A lot.
(In case you missed them, here are parts one and two.)
After my second audition to DRM200 (when I was actually hoping to get into DRM200), it took a week or two for the names to get posted. My name was on the list, as well as another GSS student – my friend, Anjali Mulligan.
I have to say, I was pretty happy – since the massive failure of Engineering, this was one of the first times that I got the sense that something within the University was interested in me. My bruised ego was getting some ice put on it.
I was happy, but also a little apprehensive. You have to remember, I hadn’t been on stage since 2004, and this was two years later. I felt rusty. And, again, the style of theater that I’d learned at GSS was very different from what was taught at the UCDP, and I didn’t know if I could change my spots.
Those who’ve worked in theater know that stage work is very intimate with the other actors. You spend loads of time with each other, you have to be able to get into each other’s space, you have to understand each other’s perspectives. Since I had been in Engineering for a year, I’d gotten used to feeling isolated, and working alone. This would be my first exposure to ensemble work in quite some time.
So, I was gratified in finding out that I had an outstanding class. All very talented, all very friendly. Collectively, we had a hodge-podge background: first year students, mature students, students from other countries, students who had worked professionally in film and television, and more.
It’s wonderful how, when a group goes through hardship, they bond – like melting under heat and pressure. Over the course of the year, working with instructor Ken Gass on scenes, improvs and monologues, we all became very close. It was a very good feeling.
The UCDP has a very positive atmosphere in the student community. We all look out for each other. When the 200’s do their first monologues, the entire student body usually shows up to support. It is overwhelming, intimidating, and wonderful. The 200’s just recently did their Shakespeare scenes, and the audience was packed. The 300’s also did some contemporary work, and a ton of students showed up.
So, the take home message: the community at the UCDP is really talented, great and supportive. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more interesting collection of people!
I’m super exhausted tonight, but I wanted to make sure I wrote about the UCDP Directors’ Shows – because they’re coming up!
Let me explain.
At the UCDP, there is a 400 level course for Directing (I think it’s called Seminar in Directing, but I’m not sure…check the course calendar). The students in this course each select a play that they’d like to direct, and pitch a concept to the UCDP faculty for consideration. Upon approval, they cast the show, start rehearsals, work with designers, work with production people, and slowly assemble their shows.
They’re also my friends and colleagues, and I think they’re all very talented!
So the shows from this year’s directors are coming up. Here are the dates and descriptions, copied verbatim from the program website:
Week 1: Thursday – Saturday March 12th -14th 2009 8pm
White Biting Dog –written by Judith Thompson, directed by Yevgeniya Falkovich
In the beginning there is a rapidly shrinking universe that is one life. A young and successful man seems to have lost the warm little centre of his world, that something which is the reason for waking up in the morning, the “stuff that makes a smile rise up”. He hasn’t smiled in years, he’s become emotionally numb, and settled in a place where the search for any meaning in life has ended with inconclusive results, where there is a void so profound that he lacks even the drive to keep filling it with day to day living. It is at the moment when he stands at the top of a bridge prepared to exit when the play begins.
The Universe –written by Richard Foreman, directed by Olga Ryabets
This play has no story, no climax or anything. I think the point is contained not in the play, but rather in the experience of watching the play. I think experiences like this can potentially help a person in dealing with the unexpected. This is a theory I am testing out.
Week 2: Friday – Sunday March 20th – 22nd 2009 8pm
Shape of a Girl –written by Joan MacLeod, directed by Sarah Miller-Garvin
Little Girls Killing Each Other: It’s 1997 and all of Canada is shocked by the murder of Reena Virk, a young girl killed by several female classmates who claimed she had stole their boyfriends and spread rumours about them. 15-year-old Braidie stands alone on a beach and finds herself haunted by the similarities between herself and Reena’s murderers, forcing her to rethink everything she’s based her world on.
The (abridged) Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil: A divertimento for warlords – written by Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai, directed by Jiv Parasram
They made it through Mogadishu! They brought Hilarity to Haiti! They made Kabul Kollapse with laughter (may be related to bombings)! Now we’re bringing them to the UCDP! They’re Ali Hakim, and Ali Ababwa! And they’re bringing a Korean!
GSS / Highschool Folk Auditioning for DRM200: It would be a good idea to see these shows – it’ll certainly get the interviewer’s attention if you tell them that you saw some student work at the UCDP. Big plus. If you miss these shows, it’s not the end of the world, but still, any edge you can get…
This is a long post. Maybe make yourself a sandwich first.
Here’s the story of how I accidentally auditioned for the UCDP DRM200 performance class, and failed my audition.
I had just completed my first year of university at UofT as an Electrical / Computer Engineer. And I had hated it. Like, really, vehemently, hated it. The computer programming classes were fine, but the other ones….bleh. ECE was not for me. So I switched out of Enginnering, and transferred to the Arts & Science faculty. I hadn’t declared any majors yet, so I was more or less free to pick and choose among the courses in the calendar that I liked. I had no direction, no goal, graduation date, no program of study, nothing. I was starting from scratch at UofT, with only a few transfer credits to my name.
So I dug through the UofT calendar, and here’s what I chose:
Yep, I spread it out, just choosing the ones that sounded interesting.
Now, the UCDP website just recently got a face-lift (I think they switched to Joomla!, if it matters). Anyhow, organizational-wise, it wasn’t in the greatest shape when I was in second year.
So, scouring around, I found on the site that if I wanted to take any of the Drama courses, I needed to audition and be accepted, and that there were only a few audition dates, and they needed a headshot, and cover letter, and a ballot form.
So, naturally, I printed out the ballot form, wrote out a cover letter, sent in a photo. A week or two later I got an email with my audition date. Cool.
Here’s where it starts to get hairy. Grimsby is about an hours drive from Toronto, and on the morning of my audition, traffic was really bad. By the time I got to the audition location, I was about half-an-hour late.
Yikes.
Plus, it didn’t help that the man who was running the audition (who I would later discover to be Ken Gass himself) seemed quite annoyed at my lateness, and the fact that I’d missed half of the audition.
So, what did we do in the audition? Well, from what I remember, he gave us an extremely short monologue, and we had to deliver it each, one by one. Here’s the monologue:
I thought we were going to
Oh
Forget it
Just forget it
We had to find a way to deliver that. So naturally, everyone was trying to do something different and interesting, and I did mine, and I have no idea how I did.
What I did notice, was this strange…familiarity between people. All of the people auditioning seemed to know one another. This was kind of spooky. I felt very out of place, and way out of my depth…and I totally knew I was bombing the audition, on top of my late arrival. I could feel Ken Gass, scowling into my brain.
And then it was over. The audition part, anyways. Everyone got off the stage and started talking to one another – again, like they all knew one another – and I just grabbed my stuff and left.
But it wasn’t over…the audition has a second half. It’s an audition AND an interview. So, I killed time at Tim Horton’s with my Dad (probably telling him how much I bombed the audition, while he listened, patiently) and waited until my interview time came.
And then my interview time came.
I walked into this room…and there were three people sitting across from a table, and a chair on my side, facing them. I sat down. I recognized Ken as one of the interviewers…the other two I didn’t recognize, but I’d later find out that one of them was Pia Kleber, who at the time was the Drama Program Director.
So, right to business (since they were auditioning/interviewing hundreds), she asks me what kind of theater I’ve seen lately. I stumble a response, not prepared…I say something about the Lion King production, and The Blue Man Group… they didn’t seem impressed at all. She asked me what kind of plays I liked, and I said I enjoyed Shakespeare (the only playwright that came to mind instantly). She quizzed me on Shakespeare, asking me my favourite play, and why I liked it, and basically proved to herself (and myself) that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
And then she asked the big one:
So, tell me, what will you do if you don’t get into Drama 200?
And I sit there. Confused.
I don’t want to be in Drama 200. I signed up for Drama 100
There’s an uncomfortable pause. Ken Gass facepalms. Pia Kleber stares at me in dumbfounded silence, and then says:
You don’t need to audition for Drama 100. Take some workshops, see more theater, and audition next year.
And I walked out. I completely blew my audition for DRM200, a class I wasn’t even going to take.
The next summer I auditioned again. I had seen more theater, read more plays, prepped…I don’t think Ken recognized me, but if he did, he hid it well. Anyhow, that summer I got in. And that’s how it happened.
The end.
Coming out of high-school, you do NOT need to audition for DRM100. You only need to audition if you want to get into DRM200.
If you are auditioning from DRM200, here are some tips:
That last one is a biggie – show respect to your fellow audition-ees. Ken (et al) are looking for lots of things; but one of the big ones is this: Is this person someone I will want in my class? Is this person someone I can work with? If you’re chatting while someone else is doing their work, it’s no good. Even when you’re not on stage, if you’re watching someone else work, you’re learning.
Anyhow, this is a super-long post, I think I’m going to wrap it up.
So I took a trip past my old highschool yesterday, and it turns out that there are a bunch of people there interested in coming to the University of Toronto.
And a bunch of them want to take drama.
So I’m going to start recalling my experience going from Grimsby Secondary School to the University College Drama Program (UCDP) at UofT. I’m going to break it into chunks – so I guess this is part 1. I’m just going to freeball this, so I’m sorry if this is all over the place.
The drama program at Grimsby Secondary School is extremely physical. The teachers, Soyka, Rosie, and Ebert, come from a physical tradition of theater originating from a man named Jacques Lecoq. So, essentially, if you’re going to GSS, you’ve probably got a bit of Lecoq training in you.
And believe it or not, that GSS training is pretty special. The Lecoq school is in Paris, and so it had to cross quite a distance to get into Grimsby, Ontario. The theater tradition in Canada, generally speaking, does not involve theater as physical as Lecoq’s – it’s a bit of an anomaly.
So entering the UCDP was a bit of a shock. The UCDP does not focus physically like GSS – it’s much more broad, and tries to give its students high academic exposure to a myriad of different theater styles. I say academic exposure, because while you might talk about other styles in academic classes, on the practical level, the theater style at the UCDP is pretty consistent across the board for the first few years.
Let me back up a bit, and get a bit more precise: I’m going to be talking about the performance practicals at the UCDP, so that means the acting classes. There are three levels of acting classes: DRM200, DRM300, and DRM400. If you make it past auditions, you enter into DRM200 to begin with.
DRM200 is taught by Toronto writer/director Ken Gass – a legend in the Toronto alt theater movement, and the brains behind Factory Theater.
Assisting Ken is Nicky Guadagni, an extremely capable and talented actor, with a very impressive resume.
In, no particular order, this is the type of work we do in DRM200:
When you take DRM200, you also take DRM201 – Voice and Movement. You have to take this course, simultaneously – there’s no way around it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. DRM200 and DRM201 interlace quite nicely, with each class feeding into each other. DRM201 is really two courses – Voice is one course, Movement is the other. They each have their own instructor. In DRM201, you have Cindy Block for Voice and Sallie Lyons for Movement.
Voice is a study of the Linklater approach to voice work, and is focused primarily on freeing the voice. Freeing it from what, you ask? Freeing it from the imposed tensions, the habitual stuff we put on it all day. It’s about finding range, and expressiveness in your voice. It’s about making people want to listen to you, and to convince them with what you say.
Movement is a whole bunch of stuff: Laban, Viewpoints, Yoga…DRM201 Movement is mostly concerned with freeing physical tensions in the body. In DRM201 for me, Sallie corrected by misaligned walk, pointed out some pretty crazy tension in my shoulders, and helped me discover some new muscles in my body. It’s good stuff.
I’ll talk a bit more about the UCDP in Part 2. I’ll probably talk about auditions too.