|
You won't often see a photograph of professional stage manager Dawn Binkley. And when she's doing her job well-which she always does-you will see very little of her at all during the plays, concerts, and events where she works behind the scenes, making sure everything happens on cue, maintaining the "rhythm" that she says every show has and the "flow" that every show needs. "If a person at a show notices there is a stage manager, that's a bad thing," Dawn says.
When you didn't see Dawn during the televised broadcast of the Easter Seals Telethons on CBC, she was doing the work she loves: making sure things move smoothly in a complex production, in a theatre crawling with workers and volunteers from the Confederation Centre and CBC Television and the Rotary Club-not to mention the volunteer talent in all its diversity. You may also not have seen Dawn in any number of the events she has stage managed since she arrived on PEI fourteen years ago: TheatrePEI and UPEI Theatre Society stage productions, countless community events, or the now-defunct Milton Acorn Festival.
Currently, Dawn is working as the general manager of TheatrePEI. Among other things, she is teaching a course on stage managing. Despite the flourishing of theatre on PEI, there are few trained stage managers. Some new directors aren't even sure how they ought to use the stage managers they have. "A lot of people think a stage manager makes props and makes coffee," says Dawn. "Now, I have no problem with making coffee, but with a quick lesson, the cast can make coffee for themselves." Stage managing takes a great deal more training.
"The stage manager is the right arm of the director-a conduit that sends information to all the departments (if you're lucky enough to have departments)," Dawn explains. "The stage manager represents the director and maintains the show the director has created-as long as its rational." The work requires reliability, responsibility, attention to detail, and a sense of humour. "I take the art and craft of my work very seriously," Dawn says, "but I don't take any day too seriously. At the end of the day, if no one died and no one fell off the stage, and I did my best… It's live theatre. You see it because it's live. If you want perfection, see a movie."
Dawn sees a lot of energy and dynamism in the theatre community on the Island at the moment, coming from both veterans who have established their careers as theatre professionals over a number of years and from the "young punks" who are determined to do theatre their way. At the moment, Dawn suggests, some productions are "stuck in between": outstripping the standards and expectations of community theatre, but not quite "professional" in all the senses they could be professional. It remains difficult to pay actors on PEI, and "it's always hard to get consistent work from volunteers."
Dawn emphasizes that she "doesn't buy that the quality is not here." There's far too much evidence that there is talent to burn in the theatre community. She thinks it might help change perceptions if theatre were considered an industry with development and employment potential, much like the craft industry and the music industry are starting to be understood-"as industries that can, but don't have to, cater to the tourist market."
But the best way she sees to "make the products a little better" is to make opportunities for training in all aspects of theatre. When she started stage managing, in high school, Dawn had "no idea it could be a real job." When she studied it at university, she trained with professionals and discovered what theatre made possible. And while she has sometimes had to supplement her stage managing with other work, working in the theatre is her "real job."
Lately, the most exciting part of her job has been to be a model professional, teaching her skill to others who are developing the craft of stage managing, training a new crop of hands and faces we can hope not to see in PEI theatres in the coming years.