Teaching in Three Media: Theatre, Television, Film

In this paper, I want to discuss two related issues, both of which will be familiar to you. The first is that though actors must, if they are to survive, be able to work on stage, on television, on film, Canadian theatre schools rarely offer such training. The second is that theatre in Canadian Universities is becoming an endangered species.With the assistance of two partners, CBC  Television St.. John’s and CAMS, the video unit at the University, Memorial University added a new programme to our performance offering, the Diploma in Performance and Communications Media. Students experience working across three separate but related media. As theatre people, we all know artists who work in all three media. In the film world, the actor can move from stage to screen, so to speak,  but rarely will film directors, producers and so on work in both media. Television is similar to film, with the actors moving between media but little movement otherwise between screen and stage and, in the case of St. John’s, little movement between the two worlds of television and film. In fact, there was tremendous resistance from film and television people to the idea that you could explore film AND television AND theatre in one programme. Despite this, English 3816, Televison was offered with CBC St. John’s as the primary partner. At this stage, we had to negociate the gap between television and film. On the one hand, both of these media use an analogue process and the technology of television parallels the technology of film. Beyond these basic similarities, however, the two media are very different. Compound these basic similarities with various union restrictions and a complex field remains. At the present time, we have a seven course Diploma which we offer with two partners. I propose to outline why I decided to attempt to bring these three media together, what I learned and how we accomplished it and, finally, how our Diploma now works.