Production & Design

• Discover an emergent artistic identity to flourish within and beyond the University. 
• Engage deeply with diverse forms of artistic expression to find and evolve your personal creative voice. 
• Strengthen artistic capacity through observation, interpretation, and communication. 
• Nurture a playful zest for discovering new approaches, challenges, and inspirations.

• Generate approaches to collective, collaborative, and independent creation. 
• Obtain hands-on experience in contemporary live performance and installation. 
• Cultivate resourcefulness across different disciplines and scales of production.  
• Demonstrate aural, visual, physical, verbal, written, logistical, and other sensory and analytic skills across diverse contexts. 

• Integrate sustainable design approaches that respond to the environmental impact of materials and practices across the full lifecycle of a production. 
• Critically consider issues surrounding equity, care, labour, and accessibility. 
• Nourish inclusive communities with collaborators, audiences, and local communities. 
• Share and learn from other people’s knowledges and intelligences within the university, the universe, and beyond. 

• Draw upon a diverse conceptual, technical, and creative toolkit to bring works to life from “seed to harvest” 
• Assess, adapt, and implement existing and emergent production strategies. 
• Recognize and respond flexibly to a range of production environments. Work across a range of budgetary and logistical scales from DIY to large-scale productions.

• Explore a plurality of creative practices across genres and mediums. 
• Situate artistic works within today’s ecology of contemporary arts.  
• Research contemporary and historical contexts to build a conceptual framework around your work.

A: Situated inside of a contemporary art school we can offer a broader range of experiences than programs that just focus on theatre can provide. In addition to working in theatre, our students work on productions in dance, can collaborate with film students, work on concerts, visual art installations, and participate in MFA thesis projects.  

Our facilities are excellent for the exploration of contemporary mediums and our strengths are primarily in the time-based arts. Lighting, sound, and projection with current technologies and expertise from faculty who work regularly in the industry. We do have a scene shop that allows us to work on construction of some scenery, but for the most part we are not building realistic box sets for a Shakespeare play. Instead we are thinking about elements of a more contemporary scenography that thinks about video surfaces, multi-channel audio, various audiences configurations, spatial interventions and aesthetic compositions. We are often working on productions that are developed without a script, through a devising process, choreography or through collective creation - which lead to diverse interactions with production elements and design. We are not building large opera sets but we are thinking deeply about intention, audience focus, transitions, composition and immersivity by using the tools at our disposal.  

We not only teach approaches to the theatrical production process, we also think about and implement processes that can adapt to different modes of production and interrogate what is required. For example, if we want to have live cameras that capture images to project on the set as part of a dance moment, what is required for that to be developed? What does the rehearsal room need to equip beyond an empty room? What are the tools (consoles, media servers, software) that allow for those actions to be recreated? Do the tools exist? Can we modify them or adapt them from other applications?

We are training our students to be agile and innovative thinkers that can respond in different environments. We teach design through extended experimentation and iteration processes that develop with the individual voices and interest of the students. Our approach to technical skills trains innovative technologists. While live performance technicians have  practical and specialized skills in the application of technologies (e.g., operating a lighting  console), technologists contribute a comprehensive understanding around technology design and integration (e.g., modifying the code and functionality of a lighting console based on identified needs of a production), as well as the concepts, tools, and forms to which it contributes. Instead of established processes that are marred by traditional limitations, technologists can mine cutting-edge tools for inventive uses that not only enhance performances, but incorporate technologies into the dramaturgical process itself.

A: No. Traditional western stage management primarily responds to a mode of regional production system that is changing as performance and how it is made evolves. Because we are not often working on productions that rehearse and are built in a traditional centralized approach, having training as a traditional stage manager process is often counterintuitive and frustrating.

We do teach many of the same organizational and technical knowledge that a stage manager would need to know, but we are more interested in team members that can respond naturally to the needs of a production. Do we need to have someone in every rehearsal to notate blocking on a script if the show has neither regular blocking or script? If the lighting designer, projection designer and sound designer are operating these elements of the production in conversation to the action on stage, does a stage manager have to be there to call cues from a script?

Our program is interested more in providing producing skills that can respond to the evolving needs of a company of artists. Sometimes this means developing a special rehearsal methodology that would perhaps include the technology in the rehearsal room or a series of residencies that tackle each element at the time. This includes some of the stage management skills, but also it means you need to know how to create budgets, manage a production calendar, manage deadlines, know when you need specialized expertise and curiosity to learn how to make something you’ve never encountered work.

If you are interested in stage management for plays and musicals we might not be the best fit. There are many programs in the province that might be able to give you that experience. However, if you are thinking more expansively into live performance, dance, concerts, events, live films, animations and forms that don’t even exist yet - we can provide training that is agile and transferable when it comes to the organizational component of a broader performance industry and beyond.

A: Our cohorts are small. Each yearly cohort in our program is between 15 and 20 students. Most of our degree specific courses for the degree work happen during hands-on studio classes that prioritize group and individual feedback, as well as demonstrations and theory lectures. For this reason we can better respond to the individual learning needs of students compared to larger programs. We do expect that there will be significant production assignments in class and as part of school-wide productions in positions such as technical direction, production management, producing and design. Each production will have at least one faculty mentor that will provide guidance and significant feedback during the length of each project. We are committed to the development of each student in our program; not only in their technical skills but also their soft skills like fostering team work, communication skills and organizational skills.

A: Yes! We participate in a huge range of events and performances. There are theatre shows, dance performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, master thesis productions, installations, concerts, films, festivals, productions in repertory and even performances that are entirely instigated and created by the production and design students. They range from mainstage productions with the participation of many other students and programs at the SCA, to small DIY works with peers .Students can expect that they will likely be performing in some capacity in each other’s works.

We assign students to a range of production assignments that are congruent with their development during the program. An example of this trajectory would be for lighting: In the first year you might be working on the installation of the lights for the production as a technician, in the second year you might be working as a lighting board programmer and operator, in third year as a head of lighting or assistant lighting designer and in your fourth year as the lead lighting designer. 

A: While we do work on many productions and do learn a lot about different technologies, that is not the sole focus of the program. We investigate the WHY concurrently with the HOW. Technical competencies and training that would lead to membership in IATSE or other technical unions require daily technical experience beyond the scope of university programs. This program will give you a well rounded foundation and an understanding of concepts, the training approaches, expectations of different trajectories that follow careers such as a lighting technician or a stage carpenter. We also spend equal time learning about production planning, visual communication such as drafting and drawing, visual research, source material analysis, design and collaboration. Careers in our industry are ever evolving in complexity and we believe it is more productive to understand how to learn to use technologies through understanding of concepts than to become specialist in tools that change every 5-10 years.

A: Our alumni inhabit a wide range of different careers in the live industry and beyond! Folks form companies together after graduation, collectives and live long artistic partnerships. They are designers in many disciplines like lighting, sound, projection, set, and puppeteers. They’ve gone on to become production managers for different companies, technical directors, film workers, touring artists all over the world. Some have gone on tour with dance companies while others have continued their training in graduate programs.

No! We want to see evidence of curiosity, creativity and particular interest in the field. We are looking for generous, hard-working and empathetic attitudes that are excited to learn and try new things.

Tinkerers, those who are wiling to problem-solve rather than get stuck, and those who love to learn and try new things, will do well in the program.

We value creative and resourceful thinking, open mindedness, and a collaborative spirit. We are committed to the artistic and technical education of every student we accept and expect an equal commitment from the students toward their own development.

A: We work with current theatrical technologies in flexible and reconfigurable spaces. Our students learn about lighting systems that include LED lights, moving lights and projectors and have opportunities to learn to program operating systems such as the ETC EOS line of products. Within video and projections students work with a range of media server software such as Isadora, Qlab, TouchDesigner and content authoring and editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects. For sound, students work with a range of sound consoles from small mixers to fully programmable consoles and and software (Max MSP, Qlab). Our wood shop is well equipped with table saw, chop saws, routers and a range of other tools. We could list more exhaustive tools, but ultimately we focus on the concepts of how things work, which is more transferable and upgradable than brand specialization and/or loyalty. So for example, if you end up in Europe in front of a lighting console you’ve never seen, you’ll know that there are addresses that need to be patched into channels that control the dimmers to fade the lights on and off - the specifics of how that will particularly be done will be in the manual - but the functionality at the root of the task is ultimately the same.  

Yes, it's very likely that during your time in the program, you will be performing in your own or in your classmate's projects. As we build projects as assignments or for the end-of-the-term class showcase, there is often an integrated need to have bodies/performers who can be in each other’s work, such as for puppet shows, video projections, or shooting video footage for content. It doesn’t mean that you’d have to learn lines or be able to perform a complex choreography. You wouldn’t be forced to perform in a large production in the Wong theater, for example.  

However, we’d say there is a great learning opportunity in experiencing the “inside” of a performance. Let’s imagine a scenario where a project integrates video projection design, lighting, and a single performer. By performing and encountering the issues of the work yourself from the performer’s standpoint, the insight from the experience might help you problem-solve how to make the timing, staging, and visual composition work better.  

We would love to see students have an art practice and a playful inquisitiveness to “jump in” themselves.  

A good technician needs to be able to see their work from the standpoint of the performer and the audience, beyond their own. Building, viewing, and performing in these classroom projects will inform your process and skill sets that would be useful to apply to larger productions down the line. 

A: We have many students from around the world in our program with a range of English language proficiencies. That being said, because we are working in environments that can sometimes be dangerous (working at height over others, working with power tools, team lifting, special effects, performance communication), we prioritize a confident handle of spoken English. You can see what the minimum English language requirements are for admission into SFU here: English Language Requirement.