If the Dr. Betty Mitchell Awards are the theatrical equivalent of a prizefight, then the heavyweight category has a particularly strapping entrant in Alberta Theatre Projects, tipping the scales at 10 mainstage productions a year. Along with partner companies from this year’s season like Only Animal (NiX) and The Old Trout Puppet Workshop (The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan), the company is up for 31 awards in 12 of the Bettys’ 16 categories.

At centre ring is a face-off between ATP’s outgoing and incoming artistic directors, Bob White and Vanessa Porteous, both of whom are nominated (along with a double nod to Kevin McKendrick) in the category of “Outstanding Direction.” But that’s where the already strained metaphor of a fight collapses, because while theatre may be many things, a blood sport it isn’t.

“Bob was my mentor while I worked at ATP for eight years,” says Porteous, who is nominated twice: once with ATP and once with The Shakespeare Company. “I’ve learned a lot from Bob, it’s nice to be sharing that category with him.”

Instead, the nominations are a timely illustration of the transition between ATP’s artistic directors, each of whom has a very personal and involved history with the company. It also speaks generally to the way the industry transmits its skills.

“It seems to me part of the job is to encourage and recognize talent when you see it,” says White. “When [Porteous] started working with us as an associate dramaturge I thought she had an awful lot of potential as a director and dramaturge. It’s one of the those longstanding theatrical traditions: Protegés are part of your job and in fact it is an oral tradition in terms of how the skills are passed down.”

“There’s no school for learning how to be an artistic director,” he adds. “You learn by osmosis.”

That protegé relationship provides an interdependency that White recalls using repeatedly throughout the years, calling on Porteous for advice and trying to ensure that every answer was an honest one.

“Hopefully a sign of maturity on the sign of the mentor is to take that pushback in a way that is not threatening,” he says. “[You ask:] ‘What do you think?’ And then you have to ask: ‘What do you really think?’”

“No one has answers,” he adds. “It is a process”

Now taking the reigns of a company she left in 2006 to pursue a freelance career, Porteous may be showing the same ineffability in her own learning experience as White sees in the production process.

“It’s so hard to look back and see what you knew when you started,” she says. “Sometimes I look back a week ago I can’t recognize the person. It’s so hard to describe what a learning process feels like. I didn’t even consider myself a dramaturge when I started as an assistant daramturge in 1998 and Bob really took me along in the very basics of the craft all the way through.”

White departs from ATP after a 10-year run as artistic director, a lengthy term that followed 13 years overseeing the company’s annual playRites Festival — source of the company’s extra mainstage shows and its considerable body of new Canadian works. His work in that capacity laid the groundwork for what Porteous sees as one of the most exciting parts of contemporary Canadian theatre, namely new work.

“Every theatre company does new work now,” says Porteous. “It’s not seen as a strange thing to do or a particularly noble thing to do. It’s seen as what you should do if you’re a theatre company and I feel really proud of that as a member of the Canadian theatre community. It feels like a certain battle has been won.”

If the battle is still being waged, White may yet have trouble disengaging himself. During our interview, he slips into the royal “we” when talking about ATP before he corrects himself, conceding later that a company he has been a part of for almost 25 years will not leave him any time soon.

“It’s going to b e a part of me until I die,” he says, “but I really look forward to just coming as a civilian to see the work.”

As the final ritual of Calgary’s theatre season, the Bettys are certainly a prime time to take a look back on a year’s work. For Porteous, the competition is more of a break in the steady rhythms of the scene’s life than a standoff between rivals. A time when former protegé and teacher can compete for the same prize without any love lost.

“It’s like sports day at the end of [June] at school when you compete to win prizes,” says Porteous. “It’s very competitive on that day and then the following day everyone forgets about it.”

Wait. Elementary school? The place where noses are bloodied and monkey bars can become Beyond Thunderdome-style death matches? By God, enough about mutual respect: there might be some fight in these two after all. Bring on the Bettys! Game on.