By Joe Sheik, May 25, 2024

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” but what if the stage is never created? What happens to the players? Which came first, the play or the players?

With the warmer weather, I pulled out a pile of T-shirts and in the pile I found an old Sears Ontario Drama Festival shirt celebrating fifty years of the festival. Fifty years of educating young people on aspects of theatre production, acting, and directing, all of which were highlighted, showcased, and taught through the festival and its multi-stage process.

Looking at that shirt, I began to realize the number of elements we’ve lost in the province of Ontario that support education in the arts. Very quietly and subtly stages are disappearing from the province. Many Ontario school boards can no longer afford the cost of curtains for the stage, and now their stages aren’t properly set up. Direction on how to enter a stage is no longer needed, and the feeling of performing on a proper stage is gone.  Many of those stages have been turned into storage facilities by schools and are not even accessible. Reduce the facility, remove access and over time the desire to use it fades to black, and with that – wonderful experiences for our youth vanish.

Lost are those first memories of performing in the front of parents, or staging the primary school musical. Gone is the thrilling glare of the lights, the stage curtain opening and seeing one’s loved ones looking back at you. The lessons about not peeking between the curtains to see who’s out there – gone.  All these subtle changes are like threads being pulled from a tapestry, and when you pull away a thread, the picture changes.

It made me begin to wonder what other changes have happened, what other supports to arts education are lost.  Gone are the teachers. Many faculties of education across the province no longer provide the training for drama teachers. It’s a challenge for a young educator, in the process of mapping their career path, to study drama in education. This means not only a loss of a potential drama teacher but also the loss of an any future educator who wants to use drama as a teaching method. The subject can no longer be easily picked up as an elective.  Due to cuts to education faculties, faculties have had to specialize, picking and choosing which courses to offer.  If a young educator wants to get accreditation in drama, they must apply to the remaining schools that still offer drama as a course. While the change appears subtle, it is quite devastating in the sense that only those who truly feel the calling will pick up the training and information. This is in stark contrast to a time when the subject was widely available in most faculties and a curious individual could take the course from whichever faculty they were at and have a love and spark for performance ignited simply by taking the topic as an elective.

Orillia Secondary School at the 2017 Sears Ontario Drama Festival.No teachers to teach our young and no stage for our youth to perform on, at least not a stage as complete as it once was.  In some school boards, theatre lights and dimmer packs are mandatory as part of the standard for new construction; however, there are few people trained to use them properly. Few to none are trained to aim, set and choose the correct colors, and with a diminishing workforce and scarce resources it can take months to bring someone in to re-aim those same lights should a volleyball or basketball knock them off their spot.

A lack of teachers, a lack of trained people in the community brings me back to where I started… what about this Sears Ontario Drama Festival? What did it do for us and what have we lost? Well, imagine an opportunity for your fledgling actors, stage managers, directors to work on a one act play and have it professionally adjudicated -judged for its merits. In such a process the finer points are explained, and taught as to how to improve.  Imagine that performance happening over the course of a weekend where your young people can see others modelling different skill sets, and different creative choices and those same young people learning and growing simply by being present amongst other young creative individuals.  That was the first tier, the first stop in a Sears Ontario Drama Festival experience.

If you were lucky enough to advance to the next level of competition, the learning and growing process would happen again, but the skill level would be much higher.

The performances are much more complex and your understanding of what is possible expands exponentially.  At this second stage, another round of education, another round of teaching, another round of learning, all wiped from the face of Ontario. Lost opportunities for those who would excel in the technological side and performance side of the craft.

With fewer teachers trained in drama fundamentals, you get a narrower curriculum, a narrower set of experiences for our children, and a dwindling population engaged in theatrical pursuits. 

 

What remains today? Fewer and fewer children are being exposed to drama in elementary school, with fewer and fewer opportunities for students once they hit high school. With fewer teachers trained in drama fundamentals, you get a narrower curriculum, a narrower set of experiences for our children, and a dwindling population engaged in theatrical pursuits.

Time does pass, and things do change. The question becomes, when things change, what do we lose? We lose part of our cultural identity. We lose part of the fabric of our country. The question becomes, do we take note, or, like so many other things, only after it is gone do we scratch our heads and wonder what happened?

We are not so far from the brink that we cannot retrieve what has been lost. We can advocate for what could be, and what ought to be – a well-rounded complete education.  If all the world is a stage, perhaps we should be advocating for those stages, both literal and metaphorical. When each stage is lost, when each thread is pulled from the tapestry not only does the picture change, but the fabric itself falls apart and then we are left with nothing more than a pile of old curtains.

Who are we as a people at that moment? Whose stories do we celebrate? What experiences do we deny our youth?  Without the lessons and cultivated skill to step into another person’s shoes and feel what they feel, and think what they think, even for a brief time, what kind of children are we raising?  You see there’s more at stake than simply the bright lights and the closing of curtains. Something to ponder perhaps something to scream about. Only you can decide which is which and what should be done next.

Joe Sheik is a theater practitioner having been involved for over 40 years. He has taught theatre production at Western University and was the consultant for the arts with Thames Valley DSB. He serves as play polisher and an adjudicator for WODL and directs for Theatre Tillsonburg.