Spotlight on Faculty: Gwen Dobie

Gwen Dobie is an Associate Professor in York University’s Fine Arts Program in the Faculty of Theatre. Her focus is as a teacher in the Acting area.

Gwen Dobie

How did you get your start in Theatre? Was there a point when you were young when you decided this is what you wanted to do?

I don’t know when I’ve ever not been doing theatre. I’ve been putting on shows since I was probably about five, every time there was an occasion: somebody having a birthday or going away, coming back, or whatever within my family, I was always putting on shows and roping all of my friends into the productions — whether they wanted to be in them or not — I actually don’t remember ever not doing Theatre.

I say to my students that I think this is a calling. As grueling a profession as it is, there are some people that are called to it and you can’t really walk away from it. It has its hold on you and that’s your destiny. I originally thought that would be in the dance world, because my first training was as a dancer, but very early on I realized that that was not right. Those were not “my people”  and I needed to be in a more dynamic world — for me. People in the dance world would not say that their world isn’t dynamic but for me it didn’t feel right, I think is more accurate to say. I wanted to wear many hats, whether I’m teaching movement for actors, creating my own work, producing, directing, choreographing or teaching. 

So your question, when did I know, it has been all that I do and who I am since the beginning.

What did you do professionally before teaching at York?

I have been teaching, creating, producing, writing, directing, performing, wearing all of those hats throughout all my career, since the very beginning. I’ve been teaching since I was 18 in the industry, I’ve been creating and performing and producing, and sometimes some hats more than others. But teaching always informs me to my own practice again, because students are always asking me questions that are really fascinatingly challenging and which forces me to come back and examine me, to examine my own profession and my own practice and creative work.I saw this wonderful T-Shirt that said “Those who can, Do, and those who can do more, Teach.” And I really like that, because for me one of the greatest rewards of being here at York is getting to teach these incredibly talented young people that keep me on my toes and keep me challenged and then I’m never stuck in what I did twenty years ago. I’m constantly re-investigating what I’m doing right here, right now.

So you’d say for you that’s your top priority here at York?

Yes, and all of the faculty members have their own production companies, we all produce our own work, we all perform, direct, create, produce our own work and so that’s a huge ball that we juggle on top of fully committing to our students here. But again, I think it informs the work that we do then with our students. That when we go away from our students, whenever we have those pockets of time, we are very busy doing our own work and then it’s like this cyclical informing process that feeds the students and the students feed us in our work and so on. So when I’m here at York it’s absolutely the students and when I’m not here it’s my own creative work.

Could you tell me a bit more about the company that you work with outside of York? I’ve been informed that it is your company, yes?

Yes, Out of the Box Productions. So I created this company with my partner William Mackwood I think eight or nine years ago, and we created it as a sandbox. Like a laboratory where we could try things out, where no company would ever, ever give us permission to do because they would never be able to take the risk. It’s always experimental, it’s always investigating either subject matter that might be a little too risky or technology that’s never been used before. Especially for my partner William, he’s always investigating new forms of technology because he’s a Lighting Designer and a Projections Designer. And for me my personal passion is to put actors, singers and dancers together and see how they inform each other, and see how those practices affect each other in their creative process.

And so our current production that we’ve been working on for the last year will be going into full production in May of 2012 is called Bugs, and it’s about insects. We’ve actually hired a composer to recompose the Opera Tosca from an insects perspective. So that’s been a really, really fun project and we’re right in the thick of it now so I’m casting and so I’m juggling things at York, and casting a show, and directing an Opera so we have a lot of creative work to do on top of taking care of my students and being engaged in the running of the department.

You said that your work with Out of the Box informs your work with your students here. Could you elaborate on that a bit more?

Well because I’m always investigating the creative and the actor process, and always looking at the physical demands of the actor, so the work that I do with my laboratory over here in Out of the Box, then over here back into the York world, I’m bringing that knowledge of things I’ve investigated in what makes an actor tick, and what they need, and what works for an actor versus what does not work for an actor, what helps an actor bridge the gap between the use of the voice, the use of the body? I’m always trying to further investigate those challenges because it’s a large challenge for the actor to be able to stay engaged in all of those skill sets.

In what capacity do you work with Theatre at York’s acting program? Because it’s not just the Conservatory you work with: you also oversee the first year acting courses as well, in addition to the MFAs. 

I am the course director for the first year acting course, which is Theatre 1010 and 1011, those are the first year acting courses. Theatre 1010 is the acting course that all first year theatre majors are required to take. They can take 1011 which is the second part of the acting program but it is not mandatory. I supervise the six graduate MFA actors and directors that are in the studio teaching these courses. And what that means is that I’m supervising the curriculum, I’m supervising these MFA instructors, showing them teaching techniques, how to teach acting, how to work with students in a studio. All of them already have teaching experience so a lot of it is a mentorship process in which we dialogue about the art of teaching acting. And so I meet with them every week before they go to teach and then after, we spend an hour debriefing about what worked in the classroom, what didn’t work in the classroom, strategies and techniques for more efficient and effective teaching methodology, so that is part of that job here.

And then I’m also coming in to every classroom and witnessing the work that is happening in the studio. I am a person of contact for all of those first year students, which we have between one hundred and thirty-five and one hundred and forty students. So I am the person they see every single Monday as a person they could come and talk to if anything is going wron; often they’re in here if they’re struggling to balance the challenges of first year, because it’s often quite a big wake up call. The demands are high, the expectations are even higher, the schedule is rigorous. So when they start looking a little green around the edges, and they look like they’ve stopped showering and eating, then I will often bring them in to talk, just to make sure that they’re on track and they’re not going to slip through the cracks. We want to support every student’s process and help them find their path, as they continue their time here at York.

So it’s a mentorship at the graduate level, and a support at the undergraduate level, for all of those first year students.

Past first year, you work with students in the conservatory in upper years?

It depends on the year, and what classes need to be covered. This year I’m teaching second year movement, and fourth year movement. Other years I’ve taught graduate movement, which I believe I’ll be doing next year as well. I have taught what used to be known as Creative Ensemble, what is now Devised Theatre. Depending on loading, it all depends on what needs to be covered and who is here to cover it. So we all will fit in wherever we can because we are all very multi-talented, to best serve the department and best serve the students.

What would you say about York’s theatre program that makes it different from another Canadian theatre school?

Well I know specifically I can speak to the theatre schools here in the Toronto area, also I used to teach at the University of Victoria out in BC in the Theatre Department there. So I know specifically that department and I know the Toronto schools. I think what makes us really unique is that we have this common first year, because we really want to create theatre animals that are intelligent and knowledgable and grounded within the theatre profession. That everybody is grounded in this common knowledge: backstage, onstage, and theatre studies, the history and the academic sides of theatre. With that common first year, people often come into first year thinking that they want something specific. The vast majority think that they want to be actors, and then, by the end of the first year, their eyes have been opened to all the ways that you can be in this industry,  that there are many, many paths into the theatre industry. And that’s what makes this department special, that there is not one destination or path, there are many destinations and paths, whether that be Playwriting, Devised Theatre, Production, Design, Stage Management, Theatre Studies, Theatre Criticism, and yes, Acting. But when you look at a production and see the number of people that are involved in any production, it is a vast community of skilled people. And that is what we want to try and encourage here at York. And I think that is what our selling point is, that we bring people into the theatre family, and you are a part of our community, and we find a path that works for you. And when you leave you stay part of that community—the York Family. This is a life-long commitment to our students; when you leave here we want to know about you, we want to hear about you, and we want to continue to support you once you’ve passed your four years being here with us. So I think that makes us pretty special. You can spot Yorkies anywhere, they’re intelligent, grounded, open and hard-working and I think that makes us pretty special.

Gwen Dobie holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Windsor as well as a Graduate Diploma from Centro Italiano Tecnica Alexander. Information about her work outside of York can be found at Out of the Box Productions.

Spotlight on Faculty: Michael Greyeyes

Michael Greyeyes

Movement professor Michael Greyeyes returned from sabbatical in 2011. After a year off from teaching, we caught up to find out what he’s been up to… a choreographer, director, film maker, teacher and actor, Michael has certainly been busy.

What projects did you take on over your sabbatical?

In 2010, I was awarded the 2010 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival/ LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) mentorship, in which an artist is allowed to create a short film, with production assistance of imagineNATIVE and LIFT, and to premiere the work the festival in October.  As part of the mentorship, I attended numerous film production workshops at LIFT throughout the spring term.  It was like film school in 4 months!  Then in the summer, I made the film.  We shot it on super 16 mm, with the amazing John Price as cinematographer.  Nancy Latoszewski choreographed and created the story, while I wrote the screenplay, directed and edited the film–which is called “Seven Seconds.” The film recently was programmed at the Dawson City International Short Film Festival this past April.

Apart from your film work, did you get to work in theatre?

from thine eyes

In the fall, when all my friends and colleagues headed back to work, I headed into rehearsal to re-mount “Almighty Voice and His Wife,” a seminal work by Daniel David Moses for a national tour.  The play received glowing reviews, including “NNNN” from Now Magazine for its premiere at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2009 and was performed in Halifax at the Prizmatic Festival, in Montreal, Kingston, Toronto for a limited run, Winnipeg, Brandon and Edmonton in the fall of 2010.  At the beginning of this year, I began development for a new theatre company, I founded, called Signal Theatre.  Our first project is “from thine eyes,” which is a co-production with Native Earth Performing Arts and co-presented with DanceWorks, Toronto's most established independent dance producer.  This work is for 6 performers, written by Yvette Nolan and directed and choreographed by me and was chosen by my colleagues at York, Peter McKinnon and James McKernan, as the pilot project for a SSHRC Insight grant on sustainable production practices. We will premiere the work at Enwave Theatre in September.

Did you get to travel as part of your sabbatical?

The River

In the spring, I travelled to Whitehorse in the Yukon to direct a new play, “The River,” written by my colleague at York, Judith Rudakoff, David Skelton and Joseph Tisiga for Nakai Theatre.  This work was created in Whitehorse and was workshopped there as well as in Toronto in November of 2010.  The reviews for the project were strong and the experience for making the work was exhilarating.  I'd never been to the Yukon before and it was mind-blowing to be so far north!
I just finished two weeks in the studio at York University, where we continued to develop the dance vocabulary for “from thine eyes.”  It has been a busy year “off,” but then again–as anyone who knows me can attest–I am a workaholic and love to make theatre.

This summer, I continue to teach for the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Opera as Theatre program, as I have done for the last 3 summers, as well as teaching Viewpoints and Suzuki for Volcano Theatre's Summer Conservatory.  I will also be teaching for Lata Pada's Dance Intense training program at York University in August for a workshop introducing South Asian dance artists to Viewpoints improvisation.

What was the best part of your sabbatical?

The best part was the creation of my theatre company Signal and for the chance to recharge my batteries and spend time being Mr. Mom to my daughters, while my wife began her MFA studies at York's Dance Department.  In my spare time, I also am installing hardwood floors in my house for my summer “fun” project.  I guess the fun part will be walking on it when I'm done.

Spotlight on Faculty: Shawn Kerwin

Design professor Shawn Kerwin was Chair of the Dept. of Theatre from 2003-2009. She returned to teaching after a two-year sabbatical in Fall 2011. We caught up with her in May 2011 to find out what she’d been up to…

What projects did you take on over your sabbatical?

When I started my sabbatical, it also ended my two terms as Chair of the Department. While I have always kept designing plays while teaching at York and running the Department, the first thing I did was design more plays. Having a sabbatical allowed me greater flexibility in taking on work out of town as well as taking on larger projects such as the set design for the production of Pride and Prejudice at London’s Grand Theatre. Working on that production was a treat because I was working with York grad Gillian Gallow as the costume designer, and co-faculty member Gwen Dobie as the movement coach. Always a treat to work with ex-students and colleagues in the professional world. During my sabbatical I have designed 10 productions in places as varied as St. John's, Newfoundland, Blyth, Gananoque and London, Ontario, as well as in Toronto.

Did you get to travel as part of you sabbatical?

I spent one month in Europe—two weeks in Italy where I fell in love with Rome (who wouldn't?), hiked the Italian Alps, saw museums and galleries in Amsterdam, London, Rome and Turin, and reconnected with friends I made while being a student in London in the early 70's. A wonderful reminder of the importance of the relationships one makes in school: we have kept in touch over all of the years and, although we may only see each other once every 15 years or so, we continue to value the experiences that brought us together as students.

What have you learned, as part of the projects that you worked on, that you'll be bringing back to your students?

Most recently, I have been a full-time resident at the Canadian Film Centre's Interactive Digital Media program based at MaRS in Toronto. This five-month intensive program has been an extraordinary opportunity to learn about the most current and future aspects of digital culture. I have been working with people who are from outside of theatre and  have had the chance to learn about a constantly changing field, working with some of the most exciting people currently creating digital media. A quote I have been hearing a lot, attributed to William Gibson: “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.” Well, I have been spending time with people who are in the thick of the “future”.

What was the hardest part of your sabbatical?

I can't think of a hard part. No—honestly! Except trying to decide how to accomplish everything I wanted to.

… and the best part?

Being given a sabbatical in the first place. It is an extraordinary opportunity to shake off the dust and take in new influences.

Spotlight on Faculty: Peter McKinnon

Peter McKinnon

In October 2011, Sara D’Agostino met with Peter McKinnon to discuss his work outside of teaching: lighting design, producing theatre, and editing a three-volume book, and what may lie ahead.

I did stage lighting for a long, long time. My first lighting was in 1975 and the last was the opening of the Faire Fecan Theatre in the Accolade East Building (although I am going to a rehearsal tonight to light a dance). I stopped enjoying lighting probably about 15 years ago or so. It was no longer enjoyable, or even a challenge; it was just a pain. I’m entirely positive in my life outlook, but I just didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Fortunately, York enabled me or allowed me or fostered me or permitted me or encouraged me to change careers midstream.

Tom Diamond

That’s when Tom Diamond, an opera director, invited me out for a coffee. I had worked on a couple of shows with Tom, so we had a coffee at Bloor and Bathurst and I remember the dance critic, Paula Citron was there. She came over to us and said that if Peter McKinnon and Tom Diamond were having a conversation she knew there would be something happening, and it turned out to be the first theatre company I formed. I knew that he was going to form a company, so I thought he would ask me to be production manager or resident designer. So when he asked me to be his general manager, I laughed and went and got myself another coffee, came back and said yeah, sure, why not.

So I ran Summer at The Roxy for two years with Tom and discovered that I loved managing because it was the same as lighting. I spent all my time staring at a screen full of numbers. As a lighting designer, the screen was all channels and levels, and as a manager it was all workers and dollars per hour. But if you put too many lights into a dimmer the dimmer blows, so they have to be correct. It’s exactly the same thing as budgeting and scheduling. I later went to Schulich and to Ryerson and got a national certificate in leadership in the not for profit sector through the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy. That was really good for me in that I learned what I ought to have been doing at Summer at the Roxy. Then I formed a company called Rare Gem Productions. A former student and I ran it for a couple of years and found ourselves on Broadway, somewhat to our surprise, with our names above the title. Just last Friday when I was in New York I had breakfast with the lead producer, my friend Bill. I hadn’t seen Bill in a long time and it was great to have breakfast with him because he’s one of the world’s great people. Just to sit and shoot the breeze with him for two hours over breakfast was fabulous. That was a great adventure – that whole Broadway thing.

After that I did a musical that came out of the first year class. We used Everyman one year as a script and many of the students seemed not to understand that there were such things as overarching moral philosophies (in this case Christianity) that one could check in with on a daily or hourly basis to see how one was doing. And I thought that was wrong.  So I did a rock and roll adaptation of Everyman called That’s Life and that was spectacularly successful. We took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is the largest gathering of human beings on Earth aside from the Olympics, and got stellar reviews, good houses, but then I didn’t know how to get past that. It needs one more rewrite, which I think will be a retirement project, if I ever retire, and then I think the piece will have legs.

Currently my project is World Scenography, a three-volume series of books looking at stage design throughout the world from 1975-2015. Volume One covers the period of 1975 to 1990 and we are in the last desperate 10 days of getting materiel together so we can send it off to the designer and he has a month to put it together before we send it to the printers. There are about 160 people in 62 countries working on it. The first volume will be 448 pages. It will be a large format book consisting mostly of photographs with a certain amount of contextualizing text to place the design in the world and in the time and place culturally. Then we start Volume Two, which is 1990 to 2005, and that gets published in the fall of 2013. Volume Three will cover 2005 to 2015 and we’ll put that out sometime in 2016.

Our take on the book is that we’re not interested in good examples of fine stage design.  Rather, we are interested in stage design that made a difference. For example, I have no interest in a perfectly typical Beijing style opera, but the Maoist ballet The White Haired Girl was enormously important in China. It turned Chinese theatre on its ear. In the American context and at the beginning of the period is A Chorus Line, a big Broadway musical without a set and with no fancy costumes. The photographs you’ve seen of Chorus Line, with all the mirrors and the girls in the glitzy gold and the guys in the top hats and everything, was just the finale. The entire show was people in rehearsal skirts, warm up clothing, and leg warmers, all carefully designed. From that period Les Misérables was a hugely influential design.  There are some very influential later works of Josef Svoboda from the Czech Republic. I have convinced the folks of Cirque du Soleil (who are very controlling of their public image) to let me have one photograph from their third show, Le Cirque Réinventé . It’s not a great photograph but it’s an image from the very beginning of Cirque du Soleil.

In the Canadian context, the production here in Toronto of The Tectonic Plates is important not because the production itself was very important, although it was very interesting, but because it was the first time Michael Levine and Robert Lepage ever worked together. Lepage had mounted the piece in Quebec City but coming to Toronto he thought he needed someone to work with. Michael Levine was relatively fresh out of school and when he came back to Canada this was one of his first shows. That was the beginning of the relationship between Levine and Lepage which went for a decade and will be seen in Volume Two in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle.  The two of them were quite the pair in the international opera world for a long time.

Similarly, there are productions from Africa, such as a production that took place in a Ugandan Police Station. It’s not a great set and it’s badly realized, but we want it in the book because that set had the words “Ugandan Police” written on it and this was in the time of the murderous dictator Idi Amin. That staged show showing the corruption of the Ugandan Police was one of the catalytic influences in the revolution in Uganda that deposed Idi Amin. Our Ugandan contributor Sam Kazule thinks that the only reason that it was allowed to be put on was because no one in Idi Amin’s government could read. So how many set designs are there in the world that have been part of the instigation of a revolution?

There are two designs from 1973 that we are going to incude. There was a previous set of books called Stage Design Throughout the World covering the period of 1939 to 1975 by a Belgian named Rene Hainaux and we’re picking up on his work. These designs were not in René Hainaux’s books but it would be a crime not to have them in because they are arguable two of the most influential costume designs. One, which will be the title page of the book, is the wire frame horse heads from Equus (which still exist and are at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Those pre-date wire frame modeling on computers and they were shortly after Buckminster Fuller invented the geodesic dome. So I have to wonder, and I don’t know the answer, is how much of an influence Buckminster Fuller had on these horse heads and whether or not the horse heads had an influence on subsequent computer modeling through wire framing.  In that same summer there was a costume from The Rocky Horror Show. People go to the movies and they look at Frank N. Furter’s costume and they still dress up like that. So that costume is going to be in the book as well.

We’re launching at the United States Institute for Theatre Technology’s annual conference in Long Beach, California in March. Then we get on with Volume Two.  Everyone that’s worked on Volume One says they want to work on Volume Two as well. Certainly, I learned a lot about geopolitics and there’s an awful lot of diplomacy comes out of this, as my students who have worked on this have noticed. I’ve had six students working on it over the years and all learned an awful lot about international diplomacy.

In the meantime, just two weeks ago, I thought up my next book which is something a couple of the staff here asked me about, the nautical derivation of some backstage terminology. One asked me, “Why is it called a boom?” Because a boom is that which holds a sail out from a mast so why does it hold lights up in the air, a lighting boom. He asked, “Why isn’t it called a spar?” So I got to thinking about that and then someone else asked me “Where did the word “crew” come from?” So I began to think I should write a book about the sea and the stage, as found in the terminology backstage. The very first backstage crew were all sailors because they knew how to deal with large expanses of fabric hung from overhead with ropes. Then I began to think I should also do something on superstitions, because most of the superstitions in theatre are nautical superstitions, like never whistling in the theatre. There is also the similarity between sailors at sea and crew backstage because they’re all ‘Peter Pans’.  They don’t want to grow up. Some young men like to run away to the circus and some like to run away to sea and I did both and I found the same people in both places.

The projects that I think up and instigate are the primary materiel that I use in my management classes. And everything in life that I do feeds the History of Visual Sources. My wife and I walked across Spain two year ago, 788 kms, starting in Southern France, up over the Pyrenees, turn right at Pamplona and walk until you can smell the ocean. It took us 35 days. We then walked the Loire Valley this past June, and that feeds VIS. This coming June we’re going to walk Hadrian’s Wall from sea to sea on the border between England and Scotland.  All of that feeds what I teach in VIS. This past June, in the middle of the Prague Quadrennial, I took seven students to Istanbul and I’m teaching Byzantine starting on Tuesday, so the fact that I was in Istanbul just a couple of months ago refreshes and expands my knowledge of Byzantine art and architecture.

Ultimately, I think I should paint, my wife thinks I should write murder mysteries, but what I really want to do is have a wine bar and bookstore. Little bar eight or ten stools in a bookstore wouldn’t that be nice? So you take the bookstore make it about a quarter of the size of a typical Chapters and it’s full of literature and fine wine. What could be better?