| This holiday season, instead of giving your loved ones the latest in kitchen gadgets or electronic gizmos, why not think about giving an appreciation of the arts with a class in acting, musical theatre or clowning?
The Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts provides a full lineup of educational programming for everyone from children to adults.
"Everyone needs to know why they should sing or dance," says Raye Anderson, the director of education for the Epcor Centre. "There is so much evidence about the benefits of the arts."
Anderson has the experience to back up such statements. Having recently moved to Calgary from Ottawa, she is the former artistic director of the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama. Before that, she was the education director for Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange for 15 years, where she doubled enrolment and created outreach programs with Winnipeg schools. In Calgary, she hopes to not only export theatre education to the schools, but also to have Calgarians of all ages and abilities attend classes at the Epcor Centre.
"What we want to do is create an education centre," she says. "We want to exemplify arts education."
One of the people that will be helping Anderson achieve that task is Daniel Libman, who is the founder and co-ordinator of the Epcor Centre Theatre School. The Calgary playwright and actor began teaching drama in 1977 at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal before moving west to study acting at the University of Alberta. Later, he taught acting classes at Theatre Calgary, then joined the Epcor Centre in 2001 to establish the theatre school there.
Libman says the school’s Adult Level I (introductory) classes attract people with differing levels of ability and experience, but are not intended as a training ground for those who hope to become professional actors.
"We get adults with absolutely no experience who finally decided to take the plunge, and whose ultimate dream is to get involved in community theatre," he says. "We get adults who are merely at a point in their nine-to-five careers where there is an increased demand for public speaking and they want to gain more experience to feel increasingly comfortable in front of large groups of people. Oddly, some of those ‘just-need-it-for-work’ types get hooked and go on to get involved in community theatre."
So how do you go from being a shy, retiring person, who spends most of the day stuck in an office behind a computer screen, to a dynamic performer who takes control of a stage?
"The first thing a student must learn is to give up trying to control what the audience thinks," says Libman. "The root of self-consciousness and bad acting is the desire to please the audience, rather than simply (tell) the story of the play. First we try to get students to observe life around them and, through improvisation, to react to what is actually going on – to listen, to respond without editing, or, to put it another way, to trust their intuition."
Libman and the rest of the Epcor Centre education staff have been helping a lot of students – more than 300 this year – learn to trust their intuition. The school’s classes were sold out in the fall and the winter ones are already filling up.
"We now offer training in musical theatre, acting – all levels – and clowning," says Libman.
The Epcor Centre also provides business education workshops directed to those who are already involved in the arts. There are workshops available on marketing, writing a business plan, presentation skills, grant writing, tax planning and negotiating contracts.
"This spring, we are completely renovating the Epcor Centre office space, transforming part of it into our new Arts Learning Centre, which will include two more studios," says Libman. "Add that to the other rooms already available to us, not to mention the rehearsal halls that ATP and Theatre Calgary make available to us in the summer, and you can see we are poised on the edge of considerable growth."
For more information on classes and workshops, call 294-7455, ext. 1075. |
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