Student Life: Forty First Days

by Alexa Topolski

It’s a ritual, and as is the case with rituals, its participants step into the traces of their predecessors with a disorienting, simultaneous sense of awe and of being outsiders. Every year, on the first day of the fall term, new and returning students gather under the high windows of Room 1 to observe the School’s initiation rites. Speeches are made — speeches of welcome, speeches that inspire, speeches that caution. For the first time, the fresh recruits meet their peers, just arrived from Red Deer, or Brampton, or Trois-Rivières, whom they will work with and learn alongside for the next two or three years. They have arrived at their temple of art, but may still not have found an apartment. They are eager for new experiences, but it may still give them a little jolt when the bus driver speaks to them in French.

Some are shy, and some are full of bravado, eager to make their mark. Everyone is quiveringly excited and hyper-aware of all that is going on around them. Each of them has already beaten the odds by making it this far — having beaten out dozens or hundreds of others who also dreamed of being where they are at this moment. The air in the room is a flammable mixture of anticipation and intimidation. Everybody feels it — the teachers are extra-animated, funnier, more inspiring. The second- and third-years, older and wiser, look on from on high and see themselves in the new students and love them. It’s intoxicating, the first day at the National Theatre School. The gasp-for-air leap into the unknown.

Whether it was last year or 25 years ago, NTS students never forget their first day. Second-year Acting student, Sarah Allen, describes it this way: "The first day of school was, to put it lightly, a shocker. I felt like a guppy who had suddenly found itself swimming with a school of much larger, exotic fish and had to wonder if it was even a fish at all."

Sarah’s classmate Gordon Miller had similar thoughts. "Growing up in a fairly conservative, small rural farming community and just out of high school, I knew there were going to be adjustments. In the lobby on that first day, people talked in clumps; I just stood back and listened to all the people talk about all the plays they’d seen in Toronto or Stratford, written by such-and-such, directed by what’s-his-name and starring somebody else. I didn’t know what Stratford was and I’d never heard of Shaw. At lunch time I came home, called my mom, my best friend and my girlfriend to tell them that I didn’t think this was the place for me. But that was the first day…".

Raoul Bhaneja (Acting, 1996) remembers: "My first day at NTS lives in my memory as a haze of excitement. I look back on it now as feeling like I was on a blind date. The only hitch was that you were going to be on one hell of a long one..." For Bhaneja, now an actor and musician in Toronto, being there at all was a triumph over his parents’ misgivings. "I’d finished early at Canterbury High School in my home town of Ottawa after I learned that I had been accepted to NTS. My grades were good and my parents were put at ease when I explained that NTS was a hard place to get into. That sort of made it more worthy, I guess. My father pleaded with me to get some ‘security’ first but eventually he gave into the idea. My father, a civil servant, has been a closet artist his whole life so he had no trouble understanding my desire."

Rafal Sokolowski (Acting, 2000), who came to the School from Poland, found his first days at the School a bit of a shock. "I heard [in Poland] these incredible stories about workshops where twelve people gathered together in a studio and breathed for sixty-four hours." He imagined the School as a place attended by actors who all had at least twenty years of experience and were in their late thirties and all were working with Grotowski and Peter Brook and Tadeusz Kantor."

Gordon Miller (right) with his classmate Dusan Dukik in JoJo Rideout's voice course. Photo: Maxime Côté.

Whatever a student may imagine on his or her first day, once classes start, expectations and defenses are quickly left behind in the relentless daily pace. For Sokolowski, what he found was no less difficult and satisfying than he had hoped. He borrows a phrase from a fellow Pole to sum up his experience at the School as a descent into the "heart of darkness."

"I very quickly got a sense that at the School there was no going back to anything," says Sokolowski. "New projects began before the old ones concluded so we had no time to dwell on them. There was no time to ponder over and relax with what I could already do, because there were always new demands placed before me. There was no time to be entrapped within such notions as: 'ah, look, I’m good at that’ or ‘here’s something I can already do well.'

"The first year felt very exploratory, so I thought the School was exploratory and the environment encouraged the development of each artist as an individual. We each had an ‘individual path’. But as the training progressed into the second and third years, I could see more specific elements, for instance the use of classical text as the ultimate tool for training actors in all the disciplines."

Victoria Zimski (Scenography, 2000) also found some of her first-day assumptions rudely shattered. "You expect that actors are going to come and do some sort of internal exploration and if you’re a writer we expect you’re going to go through some sort of night of the damned," explains Zimski, "but I think that designers forget that there’s a similar voyage to be made [on their part]. My eyes were opened to many, many things — being in the city and being in the Program and through the people I met, especially the instructors. You can’t help having your eyes opened to all kinds of things, including politics — the biggest epiphany is dealing with the voyage you have to go through on a personal level."

Since she graduated from the Technical Production Program in 1999, Candice Telfer has worked for Repercussion Theatre and the Montreal Young Company. She stays in touch with all the people in her close-knit class. "The technicians start a week earlier," explains Telfer, "So for us the big meeting was a bit different. We’d already spent a week of 12-hour days together at the Monument-National, and there were just six of us, so we’d already formed a tight bond. We already had a real perspective that the School would be our life: these were the people we would live with and party with for the next two years."

"I remember looking at these nervous, exuberant people and thinking ‘how am I going to make a connection with these people?’" continues Telfer. "In some ways having been there a week already might have been a bit of a hindrance: we already had a security blanket [in each other], which was good, but which was also bad, because it might have taken a bit longer to get to know the others."

"The whole mystique of being at the NTS was very exciting. I remember looking around and seeing all these people with talent and thinking, wow, these are the people who are going to be making theatre in the next ten years!"

Some things about the first day of school never change. Tamara Kucheran (Scenography, 2000) says "I remember walking up the front steps, where all the second and third years sit on the first day, and everyone seems like they’re best friends except you, so you just have to hold your head up and smile." Kucheran, currently working on a contract with Canadian Stage, also shares with Telfer her memory of entering a room of "frighteningly talented people. You all have that sense of being very privileged and blessed."

The first day is touched by a lingering sense of unreality. No matter how accomplished their background (Kucheran and Telfer, for example, both held B.A.s when they entered the School), a new student’s identity in the world of the NTS is still inchoate. "We all had to stand up and say our names and where we were from," Kucheran says, thinking back. "I remember Michael Eagan [then director of the Scenography Program] looking over and waving at me and I looked behind me to see who he was waving at. I still hadn’t got it in my head that he would actually remember me, even though he’d selected my work."

Both staff and returning students do their best to allay the latest arrivals’ inevitable trepidation. Mark Hildreth (Acting, 1999), now based in Vancouver, laughs that he "went into shock on the first day and stayed that way for about four months." Nonetheless, Hildreth recalls, "The people were wonderful — everyone was so welcoming. It was like, ‘welcome to the Family.’ It was like being made in the mafia."

"If I remember correctly, we had a class with [then voice instructor] Janine Pearson, who is a great person to have on your first day because she can calm anybody down," laughs Hildreth. "I don’t remember much from that first day, but I remember something Janine said to us in the first two weeks of classes. She told us right away ‘the School isn’t about making you a good actor, because the School can’t ‘make’ anyone a good actor. Nobody can teach you how to act. We’re going to help you find your own process, because everyone has their own way.’"

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