All stories about the Dome (that is, when it really was the Dome) begin and end with Bertrand A. Henry . . .
Starting from the top and going down. The loft was gone, lopped off because it was unstable, and with it went the fly gallery (which we had never used). Now there were lighting catwalks over the entire ceiling from the proscenium, back to the centre of the balcony area. The big decision that had to be made was where to put the audience. It was formerly downstairs but the size would be limited by the fact that under the balcony the height of the audience risers had to be kept low because of the low ceiling, and it was also very poor acoustically under there. In addition to that the balcony, being raked, had limited usefulness as accessible storage. In the end, it was decided to put in a false floor and create set and costume storage at the back of the balcony, convert the projection room into a control room and put the audience in the front two-thirds of the balcony. This allowed us to seat up to 200 people, which was the limit for a Studio Theatre in Montreal. To compensate a little for the separation of the audience from the stage, the stage would be raised to about 4 feet which would allow for more property storage underneath. This left, of course a fairly wide and deep gulf between the audience and the stage that soon became known as “The Pit.” On the other hand, the under-balcony area could now be closed off and became brand new set and costume workshops and new, clean, dressing rooms. On the whole it was reasonable trade off.
The reaction of old Domies was that here was a paradise, quickly followed by “but you never got to experience what we did.”
The other changes were a little less than universally welcomed, and dealt with the fact that the directors of the shows were largely (but not exclusively) the same people who taught the later afternoon classes. It was a simple fact that the time required to direct and rehearse a show was not reflected either in the College’s schedule nor in the teacher’s workload (or the Technical Director’s). A Major would appear on the calendar as two afternoons a week for four hours and would carry the same workload for a teacher as a four hour, twice a week class. Neither of these statistics came near to indicating the time spent by teachers or students on a play. As a result, there was always a lot of complaining that wavered between too many hours for rehearsal and not enough and there was a great deal of surreptitious cancellation of Acting classes in order to use that time with the same students to rehearse. Thus arose the concept of: “Absorption.”
At first it was a reasonably logical procedure. If a director had an afternoon class (and in all cases, at that time, those were Acting classes) with the year group that she/he was directing at the time, that class was absorbed into the rehearsal schedule. And it made, in this first iteration, some pedagogical sense. Why should teacher and students not do scene work related to a production, in order to do scene work on other material, when the point of both is the same – to teach acting? The faculty were even prepared to accept the fact that most of the “absorbed” classes were taught by either Victor or Bert. It never affected me since I could only direct the 2nd major, because with no classes in January I could rehearse during the day and tech the show at night. Despite the heavy work-load, I liked this because it allowed the students to work are hearsal schedule very similar to an Equity one.
However, after a very short time, absorption began to take on some new and very Byzantine twists. Bert (and later Victor) began to insist that their second year acting classes should be “absorbed” (that is, taught by someone else, or just not given) while they were directing. As a result, Bert’s (and some other’s) schedule often seemed to consist of only directing, and the student’s schedules were in absolute tatters. Because these classes were all held at the Dome, the College had no inkling of what was going on.
When it was suggested (and it was every time a discussion of the schedule came up) that there was room in the schedule to move the Acting classes earlier in the day, we were all treated to one of Bert’s classic rants. “Acting classes,” he would say, “are the culmination of the day. Cul-min-a-tion. Voice, movement and text classes serve as warm-ups for Acting classes, so that the student is completely ready to acquire the fundamental skill of his career.” I am, of course radically shortening Bert’s argument for the sake of brevity (something that Bert was very rarely interested in) and leaving out the countless examples and variations that he used, including the naming of every theatre school that he could think of and how they all agreed with him. The “speech” was particularly hard for a lot of skill teachers to listen to as it implied (or categorically stated) that what their careers were spent doing was warming students up for Bert. As a result, some teachers were reluctant to linger on the subject of scheduling because they had to listen to this speech. It was a battle that raged over a lot of years before the process of “absorption” was abolished and the schedule changed. It took a long time, and a lot of pain, to get there.
Some of the shows during this period in the New Dome, from 1984 until the Mother House (the current residence of Dawson College) opened in 1988, were: A Murder Has Been Arranged (Ryshpan), The Dining Room (Knight), The Way of the World (Knight), All’s Well That Ends Well (Knight), You Can’t Take it with You (Buchanan), Hedda Gabbler (Henry), Twelfth Night(Knight), Merchant of Venice (Ryshpan and Sproule), The American Clock (Henry), Six Characters in Search of an Author (Knight), As You Like It (Ryshpan), and A Chorus of Disapproval (Henry). I am leaving out the studios because the record is pretty unclear; I know that I did at least three including The Seagull and Marat/Sade. I also feel that I need to mention the work in this era of Eileen Sproule who was an excellent student, tireless techie and eventually a colleague who directed a Major.
This was also time when another major change happened for me. I began to realize that the role of Technical Director was at one and the same time overly demanding of my time and energy and extremely limiting in challenges and opportunities. I was getting tired and bored. We were also looking at another change in faculty that opened up the position of teaching Theatre History through all six semesters. I was asked to look at the possibility of doing it myself and after some thought I agreed to make the move on the condition that I could re-write the curriculum for all six semesters. Bert agreed to that and I made the change-over at the end of the Spring in 1988.
