Shakespeare in Paradise – the dream
Ringplay on Jun 04 2009 at 4:21 pm | Filed under: Festivals, General Theatre, Shakespeare in Paradise
So what possesses a group of people to up and decide to create a theatre festival with no money to speak of, nothing but a dream?
For us, it all began just over ten years ago. Back then, Ringplay was just about a twinkle in the founders’ eyes. The Dundas Repertory was still going — it was in its last year — and Ringplay had just been imagined, though not really formed, during the summer of 1998. Philip and I (Nico) were living on the West Coast of Canada, teaching at Pearson College where Philip had established a Theatre Arts programme. Now if you know anything about Pearson College and the United World College system, academics are only part of the equation; students at Pearson are expected to do other things as well. Instead of a fall break, students get a Project Week — a time when they go off and engage in a week of activities that have some constructive result. And the President of the college had suggested to Philip — had strongly suggested — that for Project Week the Theatre Arts students go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon — a seventeen-hour drive by van from Victoria.
Well, when your boss makes a suggestion like that, specially when that boss is responsible for getting you your job, you don’t say no, so off we went. We’d never heard of OSF, and we really didn’t have huge expectations — and the festival blew us out of the water. We saw the best week of theatre we’d ever seen, no exceptions (Broadway and the West End included), and for extremely reasonable prices Stateside — tickets were $35 and thereabouts. Ashland is a tiny town, perhaps the same size as downtown Nassau, not as large as the span of Nassau from Mackey Street to Nassau Street (Victoria to West is more like it), with three theatres, and the Festival runs the economy of the town from February to November every year. And the quality!
Philip and I were blown away, and as for the students — who, remember, were attending an international school and for many of whom English was not a first language — they were converted. Philip and I returned in fall 1999, and when we left Pearson in the summer of 2000, Ashland was a major stop on the way. That summer, we were met in Oregon by Philip’s brother David (a.k.a. the President of Ringplay), and he had his turn to be blown away. (You can see the blow by blow of our time in Ashland in 2000 here, at our proto-blog, our account of crossing the USA in pre-blog software days.)
And before we left, we’d asked the question. If Ashland can do it, how come Nassau can’t?
So there you have it, the beginning of the dream. And now, we’re going to find out. If Ashland can do it …
