The History Plays in the Classroom
• 2006 Bishop Strachan School and Upper Canada College
Under the direction of Angie Silverstein, 60 students create and perform a full 'black-box' production of The Life & Times of Mackenzie King, with lighting and set design by VideoCabaret master Andy Moro.
• 2004 Simon Fraser University
A year long study of Michael Hollingsworth's History Plays, and production of Laurier.
2006 Bishop Strachan School and Upper Canada College: A student productionof Michael Hollingsworth's History Play The Life and Times of Mackenzie King
NOT ONLY CAN YOU SEE THE PRODUCTION,
YOU CAN DO THE PRODUCTION
from a student production of The Life and Times of Mackenzie King
Comments from Angie Silverstein: Teacher, Bishop Strachan School.
Upper Canada College and The Bishop Strachan School are mounting a production of The Life and Times of Mackenzie King by Michael Hollingsworth that will open on Thursday, April 6, 2006 and close on Friday, April 7th at The Bishop Strachan School Theatre. The cast and crew are students from grades 8 and 9. We are now in rehearsal, and the process is thrilling on manylevels.
Theatrically, the medium of the black box theatre works wonderfully. Andy Moro, who is the lighting designer for the VideoCabaret productions is going to light and build the set for our production. He has executed a stage and lighting groundplan, which has been integral to the blocking of the play. The students are enjoying the fast paced, episodic scenes.
Educationally, the students are learning about Canadian history like they have never learned before. The politicians and newsmakers of the time come to life, because the students arebecoming these characters. They are also having a great deal of fun because the play is highly satirical. The students are seeing great connections to the politics then and now; for example: the customs scandal (Bureau and King) and the Gomery inquest of 2005 (there are many more).
I highly recommend that the plays from The Village of Small Huts be used in the classroom as well as in a school production. These plays make Canadian history exhilarating like no other source. By becoming these characters, students will retain this information, and understand their national heritage in a meaningful way.
from a student production of The Life and Times of Mackenzie King
2003-04 Simon Fraser University: a year long study of Michael Hollingsworth's History Plays,and production of Laurier.
SUMMARY OF KUGLER'S FINDINGS
Michael Hollingsworth’s History of the Village of the Small Huts – and their VideoCabaret productions – represent nearly two decades of work by senior Canadian artists. I feel strongly hat these scripts should be required reading/performing in school curriculums across the nation. And I find it deeply disappointing that no theatre in Canada, other than VideoCabaret, has produced these seminal works.
In my classes and production over the past few months, I have found the entire play-cycle, and our subsequent focus on a single script, an immensely useful pedagogical tool.
In reading the plays, students cover much of the historical ground they had elsewhere, but this time they were thoroughly engaged by individual characters, and their roles in an unfoldingCanadian narrative.
The plays proved an excellent jumping-off place for additional research into historical characters and events.
The plays also encouraged research into the history of VideoCabaret productions of this series of plays.
Each text suggests a distinct performance style, which leads to a stylized integration of props and costumes.All the texts demand a deep integration of the basic production elements – particularly set, light, and sound.
This integration of theatrical elements then requires exceptional precision and repeatability from the performers.
Hollingsworth’s construction of narrative had much to teach students about playmaking – especially story-telling based on research, with an epic sweep of character and time.
And finally, our School for the Contemporary Arts production has had enthusiastic response (byfaculty and students) from outside departments – English, Humanities, History, and Canadian Studies.
DD Kugler
Associate Professor, Theatre Area
School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
The History of the Village of the Small Huts Project
D.D. Kugler's Notes
FALL/03: FPA253 & FPA352 (PLAYMAKING II & III)
In the fall I offered a studio-based playmaking course (3hrs/class, 2classes/wk, 13wks) centered on the eight plays in The History of the Village of the Small Huts. It was a course designed to provide research toward the spring mainstage production that I was to direct. There were 20students in the course: 17 theatre performance majors, a theatre production & design major, a music major, and a visual art major.
One part of the course, which focused exclusively on the research into The History of the Village of the Small Huts, fell into three distinct segments.
In the first month, I divided the class into four 5-member research/creation teams, and assigned each team one section of New France and one section of The British. We taped out a performance area – 12 ft deep, 12 ft wide DS, and 3 ft wide US, and later added risers to create three levels. In each class one group would present biographies of all the characters in the assigned section of the play – their research began with, but was not limited to, The Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The group also performed a 15-20 minute response to that section – some were straight excerpts, some were collages of the material, some created new material in response to the section. I encouraged each group not only to explore the possibilities within the seemingly tiny performance space, and but also to incorporate costumes, props, music, and light.
In the second month, I divided the performance majors into three research/creation teams andassigned each team two of the six remaining plays. Again, during each class one group would present biographies of all the characters in the play assigned for that class, and then perform a 15-20 minute response to that play. This time the non-performance majors supported the presentations with their own explorations into costumes/props (visual art major), lighting (production & design major), and music (music major).
When we reached this point, I asked each student (now familiar with all eight plays) to select their top two plays for production in the spring, and to write a brief defense their choices. Theresult was a dead heat between The Life and Times of Mackenzie King and Laurier, which lead to a lively class discussion of the relative merits, and finally, the collective decision to produce Laurier. I then divided the performance majors into two research/creation teams and assigned each group one act of Laurier; again, the non-performance majors supported these longer explorations. In the penultimate class, each group performed a 30-minute public presentation based on their assigned act – one was a straight excerpt, the other was a collage of scenes.
The other part of this course, which ran concurrent which the above process, was the practicalapplication of the playmaking skills they learned while working on the Hollingsworth scripts. It also fell into three distinct segments.
Initially, I asked the class to collectively select a topic for historical research. In the first month, they proposed and discussed possibilities, and eventually chose “Hasting Street” – a street which spans the distance between downtown Vancouver and SFU’s Burnaby campus.
In the next month, they conducted, and reported in class upon, historical research in individual areas of interest – Hastings Street was not necessarily the subject, but at least the connecting thread. Their were topics as divergent as Gassy Jack, the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge, Bannister’s sub-4-minute mile, and the Woodward’s building, and the missing women.
In the final month, they began to write brief research-based scenes that moved through time. In our last class, the ensemble presented a chronological ordering of their individual scenes. The roughly-staged 2-hour public presentation was comprised of 156 scenes which spanned the Georges Vancouver in 1792, to the recently opened Safe-Injection Site in 2003, and even included scenes narrated by some of Hastings Street’s more famous neon signs. It was rewarding for the students to demonstrate their practical understanding of Hollingsworth’s narrative techniques in a presentation on a topic of their choosing, comprised of their research and writing.
SPRING/O4: FPA 450 (ADVANCED STUDIO SKILLS)
The week after fall classes ended, I held auditions for Laurier – casting 10 performers, andappointing both an Assistant Director and a Dramaturg. The three non-performance majors from the fall course assumed design responsibilities for the spring production: the visual art major became the Assistant Costume/Props Designer (under Guest Professional Designer Mariko Heidelk); the production and design major became the Lighting Designer; and the music major became the Composer and Sound Designer.
Over the Christmas break the Assistant Director, the Dramaturg, and I did intensive script analysis – comparing Hollingsworth’s two versions of Laurier, and comparing various Laurierscenes with similar scenes in Confederation and Riel and Confederation.
The Technical Director and the Lighting Designer conducted research on early VideoCabaret productions, and created a proscenium-framed box – with 16 acting positions lit through small holes in the ceiling – inspired by Jim Plaxton’s original set and lighting design. Similarly the Costume/Props Designers researched and echoed the original designs by Shadowland. The Sound Designer researched historical songs and composed over 20 themes to underscore the 114 scenes. Our research and design process allowed us to get on the set relatively early in rehearsal. By the time the actors were going off-book we were working on-stage with lights, and with a sound score – all three elements developing in concert. Props, and later costumes, were added as they were ready. In short, we eliminated the traditional tech weekend.As rehearsal began, the Assistant Director took on the primary role of physical training of the actors, supplementing the work of Guest Professional Vocal Coach Lisa Beley.
The Dramaturg had a two-fold responsibility: initially, to help bring the actors, designers, even the director, into the world of the play; and ultimately, to help bring the audience into the world of the play. Each actor researched and wrote a detailed biography on historical characters they portrayed in Laurier; when they were complete, I had them re-write the material in a first person format. The Dramaturg supervised and collated the actor’s work. He also conducted non-biographical historical research, and created a “book-of-books” which contained the accumulated information. He amassed an impressive library, made it available at all rehearsals, and provided useful websites for further research. He also combed the daily newspapers and clipped articles with contemporary echoes of the core contentious issues in the Canadian political, economic, and social landscape. The Dramaturg revised all that work in various forms – binder of historical research, binder of VideoCab history, binder of current news clippings, appropriate books, photos of all the historical characters, maps, lists of contacts – for display in the lobby. In addition, he promoted our production in classrooms within a variety of SFU departments (Humanities, History, English, Canadian Studies), and to theatres across Vancouver.
