It is still named Dramatic Arts, but it doesn't look like the spaces, equipment and classrooms of 50 years ago when Brock's Dramatic Arts started and we were there.
Funny to say there was a brand new theatre for the students back then - Thistle Theatre. Now it is the new Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts facility in downtown St. Catharines.
We toured the facilities yesterday - "four rehearsal and performance studios (two with lighting grids, one with production booth, one with adjacent wet lab), a scenography studio, coach/scene work room, the new Marilyn I. Walker Theatre: a flexible 285-seat venue with adjacent green and dressing rooms, scene shop, costume shop, production lighting and sound shops. DART courses are also taught in the venues of the adjacent FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre."
The differences reminded me of the song "School Days" with its reference to the basic education and the method of teaching:
School days, school days Dear old Golden Rule days 'Reading and 'riting and 'rithmetic Taught to the tune of the hick'ry stick
We were the hippie generation - we experienced an informality that was unprecedented. Yesterday I got present to this difference. There was 'business' in all aspects of university functioning with things very much managed and controlled - quite a different control than the hickory stick.
The picture today is taken in one of the video spaces.
I saw a shadow on the wall and the shape made me think of a 'waif' - a child with dishevelled hair, big wide-open eyes and a heart-shaped chin. In the 1800's, homeless people and children were known as 'waifs and strays' - the definition has a few possibilities:
1. a person, especially a child, who has no home or friends. 2. something found, especially a stray animal, whose owner is not known. 3. a very thin, often small person, usually a young woman. 4. a stray item or article: to gather waifs of gossip. 5. Nautical. waft.
It likely is the Miserables poster that made the look so familiar. And also Annie. The start of waif look in modelling can be attributed to Twiggy in the 1960's. "Twiggy’s large doe eyes, long mascara-coated lashes and waif-like frame defined the era. Her leggy androgynous look became the ideal mannequin for mod fashion and is still referenced today on the runway and in editorials."
So one might expect to see techniques for creating 'those huge eyes'. Of course, Google has an answer for that question. There are a few answers - varying between 8 and 11 ways to make your eyes look bigger.
