Canadian Drama Courses in Canada

[ian mcwilliams]

Have I waited a seemly length of time before shamelessly (tangentially)
plugging the pictorial history *Emrys' Dream: Greystone Theatre in
Photographs and Words *(Dwayne Brenna, Thistledown Press, 2008)?

Ian McWilliams
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On 24 February 2016 at 10:25, Day, Moira <moira.day at usask.ca> wrote:

> Hi Heather,
>
> Thanks for chiming in. I’m aware of both those documents - and of course,
> of our historic significance as the first Drama Department in the British
> Commonwealth. Mostly because of Jones, we were designated as one of the
> models for future drama training in Canada.
>
> I’ve gone through the curricula from the start of the department - and as
> far as I can tell, I taught the first formal or full Canadian Theatre
> course in the department over 1992-93. But that doesn’t mean that the job
> wasn’t getting done here much earlier in different ways. The department
> staged its first Canadian play, *Eros at Breakfast*, on the MainStage in
> spring 1948; offered Robert Gard’s *Raisin' the Devil* for the 1949 spring
> tour, and did a bill of 6 new Canadian plays in spring 1962. Saskatchewan
> also offered one of the first MA programs in Drama in the country (1965-66)
> and three of the first four theses produced between 1967-71 were on
> Canadian Theatre topics. During the couple of years that Patrick O’Neill
> was here before moving on to Atlantic Canada, he also had students doing
> research projects on the history of the early Saskatoon theatre as part of
> the general Theatre History classes he was teaching here. As is often the
> case in small departments though, these projects rested on the initiative
> of a few dedicated, visionary, hardworking souls - and when these stalwart
> individuals retired or moved on - the projects often faltered as well.
>
> As was probably the case in many drama departments of our kind, the
> strongest and most consistent influence our department had on the Canadian
> theatre can be measured in terms of the people who went on to careers in
> the educational and professional theatre in Canada.
>
> Moira
>
>
>
>
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