Third-year Theatre Arts and Performance students had their plans change in an instant as soon as it was announced that classes were suspended and online learning would carry out the rest of the semester. With this being the first graduating cohort of the program, exciting plans were set in place for their final project. Theatre Direct, a Toronto-based theatre company, partnered with the program and arranged to hire the students as professional actors upon graduation. They would then move on to perform their final project in conjunction with Theatre Direct throughout the summer. This exciting opportunity required an immense amount of work and planning, which unfortunately had to conclude due to COVID-19. Despite this setback, these talented students adapted to their new online stage and created a cumulative performance that highlighted their true storytelling abilities.
Originally, the third-year students worked on a performance titled Oz. Patrick Robinson, Program Coordinator of Theatre Arts and Performance program, says that they were going to perform this site-specific piece at a park in the West-end of Toronto where the audience would move around the park following the actors. He says, “It was based around the Wizard of Oz world, but more of a reinterpretation of the world. It didn’t really have anything to do with Kansas and the 1930s and it was much more about who these students were today in Toronto… it was more of a takeoff than a retelling.” Patrick describes that the performance would have included “a lot of magic and some familiar characters, but also some characters they were inventing themselves.”
Instead, students have pivoted to an online piece that they recently performed to a curated audience to finish off the semester. Similar to their original performance, this piece was based on the Wizard of Oz but adapted to represent the classic characters in an online world. Using filters and green screen backgrounds, the students orchestrated a performance using the features of Zoom all the while being in different locations. The characters went down the yellow brick code looking for Oz the great hacker. With the lion without a firewall, the scarecrow without Google, the tin man without filters, and Dorothy and Toto wanting to go back home to Zoom, amongst many other characters, the performance went through various web pages and ended with a meaningful message just like the original. The students did a wonderful job of captivating the audience with their fresh take on this classic and you could tell a lot of thought went into their performance.
Performing online required not only a lot of work but also an entirely new method of performing. Patrick says, “We’ve been conducting classes and rehearsals mostly through Zoom. It’s hard, but despite its obvious challenges and limitations, it does present some interesting new possibilities that we’re discovering all together. Having all of your actors in a different space and yet they are all trying to communicate in some common world, presents some kind of interesting challenges. There’s definitely an element where it becomes on-screen acting as opposed to theatre acting so there’s a different acting modality that we have to insert.”
As for now, Patrick describes future plans as a big question mark. He says, “The idea is that as soon as these restrictions are lifted, the theatre company would love to, in an ideal world, hire these graduates and continue with the project. But I don’t know when that is going to happen.”
Despite changes in the original plan, the students still did a wonderful job of finishing the semester. Congratulations to all of the graduates!
By Alexandra Few, Communications - Professional Writing Student