All stories about the Dome (that is, when it really was the Dome) begin and end with Bertrand A. Henry . . .
The period of 1988 to 1998 was one of even more change for the department (oops, now I have to call it the Program). That was one of the changes as the Ministry of Education had deemed that it was time for the entire College system to engage with a new educational philosophy: Competency Based Education. Everything needed to be changed so that the teacher no longer imparted knowledge or taught skills; they developed competencies in the students. Now, I am highly uninterested in re-hashing the long-past resistance to this idea by die-hard teachers who refused to bow under the power of the Ministry. Suffice it to say (a Bert phrase) that the new approach actually changed nothing concerning what was actually taught in the classroom – and I’m sure the Ministry and its minions were perfectly aware of this. No, they were quite happy, on the whole, to leave that alone. Where they were absolutely rigid and unbending was in the area of paperwork, old and new.
The old paperwork was the Course Outline which now solidified as “a contract between the teacher and the students” – a damn good idea, as far as I am concerned. But NOW it had to be written in the new language of Competency. If the old language said, “For first six weeks we will be covering the early Medieval era and the development of the Corpus Christi play cycles,” the new language must say: “The student will acquire the competency of OGYN, A great familiarity with the social background of the early Medieval Period and the competency YYDO, the ability to explain at tedious length the practices of the Corpus Christi play Cycles, within weeks 1-6.”. As you can see it was not a new teaching method or revised content, just a new jargon and language.
The new paper work was entitled the Course Framework and it was introduced in a computer format that was absolutely unusable: the information that was to be entered could never be made to fit in the columns provided. This led to huge errors, confusions and excessive laughter. The first introduction to a course framework always led to complete bafflement – but this is only natural, the web as we know it now was not even imagined, PC’s were fairly new and the internet was largely used for email and pdf exchange – nothing visual. So, of course, the biggest impediment to an easy acceptance of the Competency based system was its opacity of language and the ineptitude of its software.
There were many (including in our department, er, Program) who gave up and asked other people to write their Frameworks for them. And despite the clear directives to write the course frameworks FIRST and then base the Course outlines (and therefore what was taught) on them, everyone worked the other way around and started from what they knew that they were going to teach and then backwards to the Frameworks. And who could tell the difference.
I actually caught two pieces of lucky coincidence that made this fairly easy for me. One was that while I was at Humber College, I had taken a couple of courses in computer programming (the basics, but helpful) and the other was that I was writing six courses from scratch. When I got them, they were called Dramaturgy (1-6) and had been taught by a bunch of different people and their content was allover the map. The first semester had Oedipus and Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams. The rest of them were in much the same shape – whatever anyone felt like teaching. So, I just burned it all down and went chronologically from the Greeks to Contemporary in six semesters. It turned out, even though we later reduced the hours, to be one of the most comprehensive course sequences of its kind in theatre schools. And it scared a lot of first years. The courses were renamed the History and Literature of Theatre (1-6). Bert used to claim that the student’s didn’t know anything about Aristotle, “and that is fundamental!” Bu the couldn’t explain why.
At the same time as this was happening the College was putting together “teams” of “experts” to consult about various aspects of the renovations of the Mother House for Dawson’s use. There were the usual off-colour jokes when tunnels were discovered running from on wing to another. I guess the nuns didn’t appreciate Quebec winters very much. Bert did me the enormous favour of volunteering me for the telephone and communications committee. It made him look good and he assumed if I knew how to make a telephone to ring on cue during a show, that I must know about communications systems.
This was the time when Bell ruled the world of the phone. The complete telephone system belonged to them but with the development of fibre optic networks new telephone companies were coming into being and competing fiercely with Bell. One of the main responsibilities of the communication committee was to attend the presentations of the three companies that were in the running for the contract for the phone and communication system for the Mother House. Two relatively new companies presented lengthy (and nervous-seeming) presentations and then came Bell. Two relaxed executives walked in, introduced themselves, sat down and asked if we had any questions. We had one: “Where was the presentation?” They looked at each other and then looked at us. “We don’t have one; we don’t need to. We’re Bell.” After a few short minutes of awkward chit chat, the execs left. And a unanimous committee agreed. Any one but Bell.
There were a lot of memorable Majors and Studios during this ten-year period (and some less so) but I will only mention some of them. Bert was in his “American Period” with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, To Gillian on Her 37thBirthday, Rumours, Orpheus Descending and After the Fall. This was followed, later, by his Restoration period – which drove us all crazy. Victor did a lot of evenings of scenes from Shakespeare that he gave show titles like Shakespeare’s Women and Shakespeare’s Young Lovers and From Strife to Tranquility. We also had a lot of guest director’s during this time: Henry Tarvanien, Rena Cohen, Barbara Poggemiller, Michelle Chevrier, Brian Dooley, Muriel Gold and a guest playwright: Vittorio Rossi. Vic had done two years in the program before transferring to Reflections and John Lucas talked us into commissioning a partially written play from him which John would direct. This resulted in the only public performance of In Pursuit of a Cow – a tleast as far as I know. (More about John and Reflections later.) I directed The Tempest, The Dream, Much Ado, Winter’s Tale (my Shakespeare period), A Flea in her Ear (my first show with another technical director and a terrible disaster for various reasons). In 1997 I directed Macbeth and on the third day of rehearsals the Ice Storm robbed the province of power. We were rehearsing by lantern light courtesy of props and one day there was a distinct chance of the Metro going down and everyone having to live at the Dome. For years afterwards I was sure that the choice of the Scottish Play was what (secretly)caused the disaster.
