Five theatre directors offer advice to the next generation — and the programs training it, Theater News

Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping the Canadian performing arts today. The column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.

A teacher of playwriting once told me that no story, however complex, should take up more than 90 minutes on stage. Though I’m not in total agreement, I do think contemporary playwrights have to work hard to justify a running time of two hours or more — and it’s the rare play that truly requires multiple instalments. (Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata comes to mind as a positive recent Canadian example.)

I’m also conscious of length as regards Speaking in Draft. When I scheduled a video call with five directors, all somewhere between early- and mid-career, to hear their thoughts on the craft and their advice to the next generation of emerging directors, I was confident in my ability to condense our roundtable down to a single column.

Reader, it was too juicy for that. The conversation had multiple acts and movements, and I’m grateful that the Intermission team has let me divide it across two instalments. 

If you’re starting here, I recommend that you go back and read part one, which focuses on each director’s origin story and their own experiences of training, with a fruitful tangent on working across languages. Part two begins with the five interviewees reflecting on skills they wish they’d learned earlier, and their thoughts on what today’s training programs should be teaching the next generation. 

The artists on this call were candid and vulnerable. They spoke openly about their professional frustrations and challenges — and they weren’t shy about pinpointing the ways that mainstream anglophone Canadian theatre practices fail directors and artists more broadly. 

That said, I didn’t leave our chat feeling hopeless or cynical. Instead, I felt reinvigorated to jump back into my own artistic practice, explore in-between zones of experimentation, and be as bold as these five directors strive to be in every room they enter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The participants (in order of appearance)

Nathaniel Hanula-James: The interviewer.

Jessica Carmichael: Freelance director. Artistic director of Carousel Players in St. Catharines from 2014 to 2017. Currently associate professor of theatre at Concordia University in Montreal.

Leora Morris: Freelance director. Currently assistant professor of directing and acting at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Ray Hogg: Freelance director. Artistic director of the Musical Stage Company in Toronto from 2021 to 2025. Founding artistic director of Prime Mover Theatre Company. Co-founder of the Canadian Guild of Stage Directors and Choreographers (CGDC). Based in Toronto.

Margot Greve: Freelance director and co-founder of the company Mixtape Projects. Based in Toronto.

Sophie Gee: Freelance director and artistic director of the company Nervous Hunter. Based in Montreal.

Nathaniel Hanula-James (NHJ): Self-education and informal opportunities — like a poolside chat with an artist you admire — have been so important in each of your journeys. I’d love for you to speak more about this. 

Ray Hogg (RH): Post-secondary doesn’t teach you enough about networking. Not just the business element of it, but the idea of an artistic community sitting in a circle, digital or real, talking to each other, and scattering seeds that might grow later.

In my experience of post-secondary, networking was distilled down to, ‘Go to opening night.’ And do what? Get clammy hands? That’s all that happens to me! 

The really valuable stuff, which everyone on the call has described, is sitting by the poolside, or just eating an apple on a break with someone. These moments of interaction and engagement are actually the most fruitful, not only to find work, but to learn in a low-stakes environment.

Post-secondary should also put more emphasis on artistic visioning. Programs often tell you that the best thing you can do is be a blank canvas: nothing, for everyone. No! The best thing you can actually do is get narrower and narrower in exactly what your point of view is. What’s that thing you’re trying to understand or express, or communicate, or question further?

You actually have to practice visioning, and it’s not easy. Most of us fall into it by accident, but it could be a course.

Margot Greve (MG): One thing that [the acting program at] TMU did not teach me, which I would have loved to have learned, was navigating grants. As somebody who’s worked almost entirely in self-produced work, it’s been a real challenge. You may be able to write passionately about your work, but if you can’t get to the ‘why’ — why a project is happening and why it’s happening right now — you’re not going to get a grant. 

Even if you do get to the ‘why,’ you might not get a grant! But you can’t let that discourage you. As budgets have become smaller, so often I’ll call a granting officer and they’ll say, ‘You had a great application, but unfortunately there just wasn’t enough money.’ So you’ve got to stay focused, and you have to find alternative revenue sources as well.

For instance, I didn’t know that TMU, through the Society of the Creative School, has a fund that you can apply to, for up to $10,000. I only learned about it in my last year, when I got a grant to do Mixtape’s first production.

Leora Morris (LM): I have such strong opinions in contradicting directions around this! When I was in grad school, I too was the person asking, ‘Why don’t we get to take theatre management classes, or classes on leadership?’ 

I remember my directing mentors explaining, ‘We have a finite amount of time, and you came here to learn to be a director. I’m not taking you out of your studio class to do other things.’ 

At the time I raged about it, but now I’m on the teaching side and my students are asking for grant-writing classes. I say, ‘We give you a two-day workshop, but you’re in a BFA acting or MFA directing, and we need to do some art!’ There’s just not enough time in higher education to give students what I actually think they need. 

To bring it back to what Ray was talking about, my experience of the program I attended and the program I teach couldn’t be more different. My higher education experience didn’t explicitly teach bravery, but it was able to provide things that I’m not sure how to offer students in our program at UBC. 

Part of it is geography. Sophie and Jess, you described going to London and consuming work. When I was in acting school in Toronto, I had friends who took me to [the now-defunct] Harbourfront World Stage series. Suddenly, I was meeting work by [Italian director] Romeo Castellucci and other contemporary performance makers from around the world. When I was in grad school, we had access to New York, so I could eat work for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

In Vancouver, a big priority for me has been figuring out how to take students to other places, where they can be pummeled by a kind of work that they don’t understand, that formally challenges them, and that has a scale of vision we’re not used to supporting in emerging artists. I want them to feel emboldened to imagine themselves making that kind of work.

RH: Hot take — I think it’s a Canadian issue.

LM: Hot take — I agree.

RH: There’s so much international perspective on this call. When you look just a little bit beyond our borders, vast as they are, there are so many people dreaming big. I was just working on & Juliet. At one point, the two leads sit on a bench, the bench flies, and a whole bunch of smoke-filled bubbles drop from the [rafters]. Why? I don’t know why, but it was amazing! 

[In a production that originates in Canada], people will be like ‘Ray, we can’t have a mattress that falls from the sky,’ or ‘Ray, we can’t have 24 doves.’ These are all real requests I’ve made. There’s something in our water that keeps us contained.

LM: This is why I think geography is a key piece of this question! Lots of us — and Margot, you will too, if you haven’t already — have spent time in other countries, seeking that out. 

Jessica Carmichael (JC): I find collaborating with designers — and stage managers, et cetera — is a dynamic process that I’m always looking to deepen. The challenge is to successfully translate raw, abstract emotions into a unified visual world. In Canada, it’s a difficult conversation. There are some great artists who want to take big leaps, and there’s a lot of difficulty around making those visioning potentials possible.

Without pitching Concordia, I do love it there. Sophie’s come in and directed for us in the acting program, and I teach more in the performance creation program: this weird little BFA that no one knows about or how to advertise, that has room for directing, writing, puppetry, circus, scenography, and more, [depending on students’ interests]. We have students coming in who just want to make their own work, and what we try to do is get out of their way, while offering different ways to enter the practice and dismantle traditional hierarchies.

We can make our topics within that program. I created a course called ‘The Performer-Creator Prepares,’ playing on Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares, but it’s really about residencies and grant writing. We spend 14 weeks just making shit, so students can apply to a residency or a grant. I’ve had students successfully get grants out of the class, and it’s been fabulous. 

As of this fall, we’re merging theatre, dance, and music into a new school of performance within the faculty of fine arts. It’s been years in the making.

I agree that in an institution, it’s hard to seek out bravery, but it’s the people in it who have to break down the walls. Nine years in, I still feel like a new faculty member, and I still struggle with how slow change at universities can be, when I think it should be urgent. I think that’s another issue that we encounter in the training, is that we don’t make it urgent enough to break down the walls.

Nathaniel, we need three more hours!

NHJ: Leora, is it true that more and more MFA programs in directing are shutting down? 

LM: There are so few left. I think there are four in the whole country currently. University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa. York is on hiatus. Is that it? Is there anywhere in Quebec?

JC: No.

LM: It’s wild to me that in the city of Toronto, you cannot get an MFA in directing anymore.

RH: In Canada, it’s really difficult to get training in leading a musical theatre rehearsal room, specifically. When I’ve run RBC apprenticeship programs, we spend a lot of time talking about how to work with a gigantic team, and about the choreographer-music director-director relationship. Those three roles are equal dramaturgical partners.

LM: Margot, this is why I think it’s so cool that, not only are you making your own work, but you’re making musicals! That is so epically tenacious.

MG: It’s what I’m passionate about, but it’s definitely been a struggle. It’s funny trying to work in a city that’s so at odds with what your personal mandate is, and where most theatres’ mandates are not at all in line with the work you’re creating. Toronto theatre, very specifically, takes itself so seriously. Meanwhile, its audiences seem to love work that doesn’t take itself seriously and that’s meant to create laughter. 

I think that musical theatre in general is deprioritized in Toronto, unless it’s operating at a Mirvish scale — especially new large ensemble musicals, which is what I do. New musicals are such large ventures, and [funding is] extra challenging right now.

At the same time, I’ve been a bit pigeonholed as a musical theatre director. Again, that’s where my passion lies, but I do other things, and it’s really hard to break free from that mold.

SG: Can I share a story? After I did my first French show, Lévriers, in the fall of 2018, I was set to direct for Imago Theatre [where I was an associate artist] a few months later. My boss saw Lévriers, and she was a little disturbed. She said, ‘You’re directing for us next, but this is what you make and that’s where your heart is.’ 

That was frustrating to me, because we can like and do more than one thing. We can move from musical theatre to [straight plays]. I can move from devised work to text-based work. I don’t understand this pigeonholing, and hopefully we can move beyond it.

Earlier, we talked about grant writing as part of leadership training. Another thing that’s connected to leadership, that I feel I would have benefited from, is conflict management training. We just don’t learn that at school. In theatre, emotions run so high and we’re so vulnerable with each other, so if we were to expand the training I think that would be a good thing to add.

NHJ: I love the work that the organization Ground Floor is doing around conflict management training for theatre artists.

I want to follow up on this idea of people not always knowing where to put you as a director, as well as the struggle to realize more ambitious visions. We have less of a history of supporting auteur directors in anglophone Canada, compared to other regions or countries.

JC: They’re frowned upon, I think. Taking big, symbolic emotional risks is, for me, the centre of the practice. As Sophie said, you should be able to do everything and anything, while never leaving your heritage at the door. You should be able to experiment relentlessly with who you are, no matter how abstract the work is. 

[People] can call it overrated or obtuse at the start of your career. I was literally called that last year — obtuse and overrated. I thought, ‘I haven’t even been rated, and I’m already overrated? Man, my career is done.’ It took me months to get over it, to be honest. I was in Rhode Island on my sabbatical, and I kept thinking ‘I can’t direct. I’m overrated and garbage.’ I had to push through the resistance in this country to unlocking artistic freedom and making true, passionate art.

If you hold onto that [determination], you’ll find the collaborators that you want to have profound artistic friendships with. It’s all about finding people who want to be in that in-between with you. 

SG: I tell emerging artists to go and see as much as they can, find the people who are making the work that excites them, and then try to make work with those people, or at least contact them. Your artistic kin don’t have to be the people you trained with.

JC: The grey areas of the work, the experimentation, is where it’s at. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of infrastructure to support experimentation on our stages, or in our rehearsal halls. The rehearsal process often isn’t long enough to allow for that kind of work.

You can get really stuck in being told that you’re one thing all the time. I’m very fortunate that I get offered work. I wish I were as brave as Margot; I’m very timid about writing or pestering people. But the offers are often about one thing someone’s seen me do, or one category they’ve put me in. 

Those offers are still exciting, because you want to build your artistic voice and keep expanding it, but at the same time I want more space and autonomy to just be a mess. There’s not a lot of room for that. It’s a great thing to discuss with your students, because they ask, ‘Don’t you have to be decisive?’ I’m like, ‘Yes — and messy.’

RH: Jess, I’ve been saying a lot recently to mentees, ‘Pursue knowing your creative self relentlessly.’ I’m a big review reader — I obsess over them. There’s a blogger who hates me with a royal passion. However, she gets me! It hurts because she doesn’t like what I do, but she completely gets my intention, which is so interesting.

As I grow more experienced and older, I’m realizing that my compulsion to read reviews is a throwback to the dance world and needing external validation. The mirror, right? That’s the number one external validation in dance. But now those reviews are just data collection for me. I don’t actually feel anything anymore. What I’m looking for is, ‘Do clever people understand what I’m pursuing with this project?’

JC: That’s a great way to look at it.

LM: I don’t know if other people on the call have felt this, but I used to have this false, fantastical idea that at some point, my body of work and my artistic voice would be legible and knowable to people outside myself, the way I used to see my mentors’ whole careers in a perfect little bubble. 

I’ve come to realize, I have to let that go. I work in too many spaces that don’t know about each other, or too many modes that don’t talk to each other. In [anglophone] Canada, we don’t have enough opportunities for directors, so you’re either in a phase of building or hustling. 

There’s no point that you reach where enough people know about you or your work, and there’s enough confidence in your ability to lead, that you’re guaranteed a sustained career. There are very few directors who are assembling a solid season after season of work for themselves.

There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about feeling that I’ll never be wholly known by one artistic community, but I’m working on accepting it. That’s my job — to hold all the parts of my practice. 

JC: I love what you’re saying, because it doesn’t exist in your life more broadly — to know what your season after season is going to be. Life is a winding path. That’s the thing about letting go: I catch myself saying things like, ‘I wish I knew x,’ but I know in midlife that it’s all good. 

I didn’t know that I’d be a mom, or that I’d raise my daughter completely alone. [Letting go and embracing] the winding path allowed me to accept those things, and make them a part of the work ahead. Not everyone’s going to know or appreciate that, but I do. 

I always say to my students, even in playwriting, that they’re the first audience. You write to yourself, or direct to your passions, and it’s okay if someone doesn’t get it, because you do, on some level. 

RH: I think you’re all wonderful, and everyone on the call has talked about being in-between. When I was a contemporary dancer, I also loved jazz, and that made my dancing interesting. My favourite note I’ve ever received was when I was in Cats, and the resident director said, ‘Ray, it’s a bit too Martha Graham.’ And I thought, ‘That’s perfect for me!’

When I directed a production of Andrea Scott’s Controlled Damage [about the life of Viola Desmond], I think it was very different from what anybody expected. A colleague said, ‘You turned it into a musical,’ but the show had music and dance in it already. That’s what made the play so vital. Is being hard to define from the outside what makes everybody at this table really compelling?

NHJ: Sophie, I see that you wrote something in the chat about ‘the ecotone.’ What does that word mean?

SG: It’s the transitional area where two different ecologies meet, like an estuary, a lagoon, or the area between a grassland and a forest. They’re supposed to be some of the most fertile environments. The artist Hoda Adra told me about them when we were working on a piece called Habibi’s Angels: commission impossible. That show had a lot of ecotones, in the sense that all the elements were just smashed together. We made something very messy and crazy.

NHJ: I think this video call has been a beautiful ecotone of all your different visions.

WRITTEN BY

Nathaniel Hanula-James

Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.

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