The TDS Curriculum

The first year in TDS is all about fundamental skills — and about learning safe ways of taking risks, trying things out, recognizing the value of failing, and collaborating in an ensemble.

Studio classes meet for 9 hours a week in the fall term and 12 hours a week in the winter term, focussing on the actor's instrument: your voice, your body, and your mind. You will lay a solid foundation of vocal and physical work for six hours a week each term, while beginning to build your arsenal of acting techniques in classes that emphasize improvisation and exploration. You will also be introduced to the fundamentals of creative collaboration, including professional best practices in safe and consent-based intimacy work. The overarching theme of first year is acquiring the tools that will allow you to be present, open to impulses, and to make conscious offers and choices in the creative process that is rehearsal.

In the fall term, you will also take classes on stagecraft, being introduced to all aspects of how a production is designed and built (from wardrobe and set to lighting and sound). In both terms, you will develop a deep familiarity with backstage processes as you spend on average three hours a week on crew calls, participating in the mounting of our mainstage season. You will be working in our carpentry shop or painting set pieces, sewing costumes or keeping things going backstage as part of the running crew. In addition to crew calls, you will  interact with audience members while ushering for performances.

At the same time as you develop these practical skills, you will also explore a wide range of historical forms of performance and read a rich selection of plays in two courses that introduce you to about 2,500 years of theatre and performance history. You will watch and begin to analyze live and recorded shows, and you will acquire a basic understanding of the astonishing range of ideas and forms that have given shape to the art form we call "theatre" over the millennia, all over the world.

Performances for an audience are not part of the first-year curriculum: the goal throughout the year is to develop a sense of the value of process, not of delivering a polished product. But first-year students have many opportunities to perform in extra-curricular productions, especially those staged by the English and Drama Student Society (including the U of T Theatre Festival in the fall) and during our student-run festival of original plays in winter term, the Beck Festival.

The second year in TDS builds on the foundations laid in year 1. In both terms, you will spend 12 hours each week in studio classes, further developing your vocal and physical skills in areas including heightened text, character movement, and mask work. Acting with text becomes a central focus in second year, with six hours each semester devoted to extensive, process-oriented scene work drawing on a diverse variety of material from contemporary drama as well as various older traditions (including, but certainly not limited to, Shakespeare). All acting classes at this level adopt a rehearsal model to explore expressive possibilities and experiment with choices, encouraging students to draw on the skills and approaches they have practiced and learned about to develop their own, individual ways of working — and to learn how to collaborate with others at the same time.

You will also continue to be involved behind the scenes on mainstage productions, often in roles that require attending rehearsals (such as Apprentice Stage Manager positions). By the end of second year, you will have acquired a thorough understanding of professional production processes and practices.  

This practical work will be directly linked to and informed by courses on the history of Canadian theatre and on dramaturgical analysis. The former will allow you to contextualize the work you are doing as an actor in the broader field of the Canadian theatre world, while the latter will provide you with vocabularies, theories, and tools for analyzing text with a view to performance, and for analyzing performances with a view to understanding how theatre makers transform text into stage action. An optional course on Shakespeare will give you an opportunity to dig deeper into cultural and theatrical history and to hone your analytical skills.

In second year, TDS students often take leadership roles in extracurricular productions and theatre-related student groups. Many students also take additional courses to broaden their educational experience and extend their vistas as artists — such classes may include those offered in English, Creative Writing, or Game Studies in the Department of English and Drama, but students also regularly enrol in courses in Anthropology, Cinema Studies, Classics, History, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, or Women and Gender Studies.

In your third year in TDS, you will take stock of the skills and ideas you acquired in the first two years and put them to the test.

Studio classes will continue at a similar level of intensity as before, with 10 in-class hours a week. Movement now takes more specialized forms: you will be introduced to the fundamentals of stage combat and will begin to explore dance as a mode of theatrical expressivity. Voice classes will equip you to handle extreme vocal demands, and singing instruction will add another key element to your training. Acting for the camera will be introduced in first term and developed in second term, and shorter units (4-6 weeks each) on specific stylistic challenges will broaden your creative horizon: in those, you might explore texts from Ancient Greece, the traditions of Realism and Naturalism, melodrama, postdramatic theatre, and/or culturally specific forms of performance; you will be encouraged to explore genres and traditions of particular interest to you as you grow and evolve as a theatre artist. As before, acting classes will continue to take a process-oriented approach, consistently preparing you for the kind of work you will do in professional rehearsal rooms.

In a separate year-long course, you will spend the entire year practicing different approaches to devising original performance pieces, culminating in a 25-30-minute show devised as a small group project under the guidance of an experienced director; all devised pieces will be performed publicly towards the end of the second semester. Your first public performance in TDS, however, will occur in the fall term, as part of an ensemble tackling a "classic" — a play written in heightened language before 1900, cut for a 90-minute run-time, and directed by an established theatre maker. The Classical Project, which is performed without elaborate costumes, sets, or lighting designs, will allow you to bring everything you have learned about movement, voice, text, and creative collaboration together in a full-length rehearsal process focussed entirely on actorly exploration and expressivity. This project runs alongside your regular studio classes, with rehearsals scheduled for an average of 12 hours a week.

Even as your practical work thus intensifies in third year, you will begin to take more advanced classes in theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory. At this level, you will have a range of courses to choose from: students put together their own individual routes through the curriculum. Courses on playwriting, always taught by major published and performed dramatists, are offered every year. Students can also choose from classes on modern and contemporary drama and performance practices as well as courses on specific aspects of theatre history and theory. Topics might include Developmental and Production Dramaturgy, Political Theatre, Queer Performance, African American Drama and Theatre, the History of Performance Styles, Chekhov, The Drama of the Global South, Feminist Theatre, Brecht, Intermedial and Digital Performance, Puppetry, and many others. You would normally take two of these classes every term in both third and fourth year.

Your fourth and final year in TDS is meant to expand your scope beyond what you are learning in class to the wider professional world beyond. You will perform in two mainstage shows, one per semester, and you are guaranteed at least one major role — the kind of performance you can invite agents and artistic directors to see. These are the fully designed and built shows you worked on in first and second year, directed by established industry professionals and rehearsed under conditions designed to mimic those of a real-world theatrical production. Each rehearsal and performance process runs for an intense 6 weeks of the semester, with up to 32 scheduled hours a week.

At the same time, you will continue to take 10 weekly hours of studio courses in all the major areas that have structured your curriculum since day one. In voice, you will now explore accents and dialects, and singing instruction continues from year three. In movement, more advanced forms of dance and choreography are introduced. 4-6-week acting and performance workshops will give you options to explore topics of particular interest to you and will vary from year to year; they might include training in voice-over work, commercial acting, self-producing, acting for video games, physical theatre, clown, and intermedial performance. And you will prepare for entry into the professional worlds of theatre and performance in intensive audition workshops, both for in-person formats and for self-tapes. Throughout the year, your class will meet with industry professionals, from casting directors to agents, artistic directors to TV show runners, for in-depth conversations and Q&A sessions. Further real-life-preparedness workshops will focus on doing your taxes and writing grant proposals.

Throughout the year, you will continue to develop your own working methods and process through a solo-performance project, either based on original writing or an assemblage of out-of-copyright material. These solo pieces will be performed in a two-day festival that functions as the capstone to your four years in TDS; your solo show showcases your individual creativity and artistic goals — the kind of work you could immediately take on tour on the Fringe circuit.  

Alongside this intense practical work, you will still explore new areas of history, theory, and drama, taking further courses of the kind described in Year 3. You might develop your writing skills in Advanced Playwriting or in a Creative Writing course about Spoken Word; you might dig deep into quite specialized topics in small, discussion-based seminars; or you might work one-on-one with a faculty expert on a topic of particular interest to you not covered in a course we offer. Two particularly exciting options will usually be available in the summer between third and fourth year: one is a residential summer course at the Shaw Festival that explores repertory theatre in action; the other (currently in development) is an internship course that allows you to receive an academic credit for spending 6-8 weeks working with one of the major theatre companies in Ontario, observing production processes and/or participating in casting and rehearsal processes.