From the Floor to the Flies: Students in the Monument

by Patrick McDonagh

When student actors stepped onto the stage in the recent NTS productions of George F. Walker’s Better Living and Escape from Happiness, they emerged in a space that blended the mundane with the magical. Walker sets, like his characters, are notoriously downmarket, and these productions were no exception. In fact, though, that quality was an illusion carefully crafted and refined by the actors, designers and technicians who worked on the shows. And the Monument’s opulent Ludger-Duvernay Theatre cast its own mysterious spell.

It was her first time working at the Monument for actor and director Niki Godagni, assistant director to guest director Ken Gass on the two George F. Walker shows. “I walked around in awe of what these kids had at their disposal,” says Godagni. “It’s not just the building, but the history — the halls of old photographs. As a professional you spend a lot of time in bunkers built in the 1960s, like the National Arts Center, which don’t even hold vibrations of the voice the way the Monument does.”

The Monument positively throbs with history. Built and named the Monument-National in 1893 for the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the Monument was first rented by the NTS in 1965 for use as a training and performance space. In 1970, the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste decided to sell the building. Arthur Gelber, a member of the School’s Board of Governors and prominent Canadian arts patron, bought the theatre and held it in trust for the School until 1978. Sadly run-down, the Monument was in need of massive renovations. Once these were completed — in time for the Monument’s 1993 centenary — it became one of the School’s most valuable teaching tools.

The Monument has two major performance spaces (it also has two smaller spaces, rarely used by the students). “As a result,” says Norberts J. Muncs, head of the Technical Production Program, “students confront two sets of problems. For instance, it’s very challenging to create intimacy and subtleties with lighting and sound on the main stage.” But teachers and technology help students to deal with the problem. “The Monument has the high end of technology,” Muncs says, “and we try to push shows to that higher end.” Student production managers on each show plan labour and technical budgets as part of their training. “If you’ve confronted a situation on the mainstage, you’ll have no problem dealing with it anywhere else,” says Muncs.

Students preparing shows in the Ludger-Duvernay Theatre and in the smaller du Maurier Theatre get an immediate sense of what works and what doesn’t work. “We can see them grow in terms of what are different kinds of problems faced and solutions,” Muncs says. In addition, the building’s complete workshop facilities deepen their understanding of the pragmatic creations involved in theatre. “They learn what it’s like to have their own space and they develop an ease with building things, because they’re involved in these processes.”

The same concerns — and advantages — apply for Scenography students. Helen Rainbird, head of the wardrobe department for the Monument, removes a student’s costume sketch pinned on the wall to illustrate the special needs of the stage. “The character in this maquette already has a dramatic look, but in the shop this coat became slightly longer, with the shoulders exaggerated.” The full costume will be given a patina — a process that involves painting directly onto the fabric, and perhaps splicing in other fabrics, to create texture, shadows and light. “Up close, it looks quite fake,” she explains, “but put it on the main stage, and everything blends together to give depth and volume to the costume.”

“When you’re designing for the Ludger-Duvernay, because it’s a much bigger space and the audience is much further away, you need to push everything a bit to have it ‘read’,” she explains. “If you put someone on stage in contemporary clothes and then sit in the balcony, that person almost disappears.” The wardrobe facilities are extensive. They include a dye room (with massive dye vats salvaged from hospital kitchens, where they previously enjoyed life as soup pots) and a large wardrobe room with six cutting tables, eight industrial sewing machines, and a veritable army of dressmaker dummies, among other things. “Our students are not going to be designing at Stratford immediately — although they probably could,” Rainbird says. “We give them the tools they need: it helps your imagination if you know what the possibilities are.”

Performance tools are also developed on the Monument’s stages. “Actors at the School are being trained for any size space in Canada,” says Maja Ardal, who guest-directed The Good Person of Szechuan in December 2001. “Most theatres they’ll be working in are probably mid-size, but it’s important not to be intimidated by a big stage.” The Monument has a range of spaces, so when graduates take their skills out to the world, Ardal notes, “they have the confidence that they can work with integrity and honesty no matter how large the space.”

Ultimately, says Ardal, students across the theatre disciplines learn from the Monument by feeling at home in it. “They have to feel ownership, and believe that the Monument is theirs from the floor to the flies.” And when they feel that ownership, the building itself, with its stages, workshops and rehearsal rooms, becomes one of their best teachers, and one whose acquaintance former students will always remember fondly.

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