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The Challenges of PD in Canadian Theatre

Aaron Willis

Actor, Director, Co-Artist Director

The term “professional development” is something of a misnomer when applied to the art of theatre. Conventionally, professional development often refers to a program of activities that either a corporation or institution implements to make sure their workers are, ideally, being continually educated and brought up to speed with developments in their industry. The general assumption seems to be that in any given profession, there is a base level of knowledge that everyone needs to do their job adequately, and the purpose of PD is to help a person to keep expanding that knowledge base through his/her entire life.

This paradigm doesn’t fit so well when applied to creating theatre, primarily because the whole notion of professional development assumes that one is already regularly working at one’s profession! Theatre, like any craft that is based on practical, physical skills is something that a person only learns by doing. The occasional class or workshop, while undoubtedly helpful and necessary, are no substitute for working and creating on a consistent basis. The Canadian Actors Equity Association (CAEA) website defines professional development as “activities which increase the employability of artists working in theatre, opera and dance and encourage improvement of existing skills or creation of new skills, encourage artistic exploration, and/or and strengthen a specific artistic community.”

When we refer, however, to the actual “professional development” activities of theatre performers, we are talking about trained actors who work many different jobs in order to make a living (jobs which rarely have anything to do with his/her skills) and who devote a portion of their meager income to pay for “professional development”. The classes and workshops they purchase may or may not have any bearing on their “employability” as an actor, but at least they feel like the skills they do have aren’t getting rusty from lack of use.

This is absurd, but it’s also one of the realities of working in Canadian theatre. Still, there are a few things that are particularly galling about this absurdity:

First, subsidies for professional development are virtually non-existent because our granting bodies (Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council) are largely focused on funding projects and organizations. The cost of taking classes and workshops on a regular basis can be extremely prohibitive. So artists are essentially expected to pay for their own development, even though they may not be making a living from their art anyway.

Second, CAEA’s Professional Development Fund, which is the only granting body dedicated to PD, does not propose to fund anything that is visibly different from any class offered at Equity Showcase or any other acting studio. The only difference is that Equity members get to propose what type of class they want to take – however, they are still expected to pay fees. The classes are also expected to be open to members at large, which prohibits the application of a collective of artists who want to work on a skill.

Third, theatre is an art that is created collectively, but the avenues open for professional development do very little, in my opinion, to allow for true collaboration. Taking occasional classes and workshops with strangers does very little to “encourage collegiality”, “strengthen the artistic community” or any of the other lofty ideals that the PD Fund application invokes. The likelihood of developing a working creative relationship with anyone in any given class is, realistically, pretty slim. If I decide to pay out of my own pocket to take classes, I’m not really collaborating with anyone other than the instructor – I am learning for myself, and on my own.

The CAEA PD fund is, in principle, the perfect arrangement; it lets artists tell their organization what it is they want to learn. What could more valuable than a self-generated learning process by a group of artists who want to learn together? But as I’ve outlined above, the ability of this fund is crippled by an assumption that can best be summed up like this: Professional Development is something an artist does on his or her own time. It is seen as somehow separate from artistic creation; but for an artist, professional development is not something that you do when you’re not working – it is working!

Our granting bodies want to see results, this is why they primarily fund projects, but as everyone who works in theatre knows, a project can incubate for a long time before its creators know exactly what it’s going to be. Why should PD – which is essentially time dedicated to artistic process, not results – be relegated to a position of secondary importance?

If we agree that allotting resources for professional development is a worthwhile thing to do, we need to re-evaluate how we disburse what little money there is in terms of making it more affordable and more attuned to the creative processes of artists. The underlying assumption that theatre artists ought to develop their skills on their own time and money is an insult to the creative process – if we expect our artists to contribute to their own development, what more valuable resource than their time should be expected of them?

Aaron Willis Actor & Director, CAEA
Co-Artistic Director, Convergence Theatre

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