On Wednesday, 21 July 2021, at 11am EDT, Stephen Johnson talked with Amy Bowring about her first experiences with Performance--her 'First Gatherings.' A recording of that conversation is included below, in full. Amy is the Executive and Curatorial Director of Dance Collection Danse. You can find out more about her life and career here.
Amy grew up in rural southern Ontario, in a farming family originally from Newfoundland. Both cultural traditions figured prominently in her early memories of performance, both as performer and as audience member. She studied dance all her life, leading to an Hon. BA from York University, and is now caring for the memories and artifacts of dance as a curator.
Her first, longest and most 'formative' memories are of her dance training in the 1970s and 1980s, from age 7 to age 19, every week and with end-of-year recitals, studying with the Errington-Graham Dance Studios. Because Amy is now a dance historian, she knows the story of this school, which ran from 1917 until 2015, with a base in London, Ontario, but a mandate of teaching/reaching-out to surrounding local communities. Over the decades it developed a unique, and likely the first dance curriculum in Canada for rural communities. Amy provides this history in brief during her interview, and then provides us with her own history-as-witness. She attended class every week, in the basement of St David's United Church in Woodstock, in their community hall. She remembers that it had a concrete floor, with simple chairs that were turned toward the wall to create a barre, and a class that ranged from about twelve for the early years, to about five for more advanced, senior classes. The training included ballet, tap and jazz, but for the most part Amy remembered and talked about ballet.
Among her specific memories are of the range of costumes she and her cohorts were able to wear for recitals, which she realized only much later were all brought in by the teacher, and used repeatedly by succeeding generations of students, a kind of physically-embodied history of the school and of dance. She remembers that they were forever being repaired by the teacher, who mended tears in the tulle by sewing flowers, the costumes transforming their look over the years. She later learned, when she became a working dance historian, that the costumes dated back to the 1940s and had been used by the London Civic Ballet Theatre, the company started by Richard and Marion Errington.
The most central figure in these early memories of training was her teacher, 'Miss Liliane,' (Liliane Marleau Graham, the daughter-in-law of Marion Errington, who had been Marion Graham in a prior marriage and whose son, Ron Graham, married Liliane), who taught Amy through all of these years, in that church. 'Miss Liliane' had a career as a professional dancer in musical theatre, CBC variety shows and the CNE Grandstand shows, toured in variety and military shows in the 1940s, worked with the London Civic Ballet Theatre touring through Southwestern Ontario, and had strong connections with the professional dance community beyond the region (such as taking master classes in Toronto with Gweneth Lloyd, Boris Volkoff, Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant). Amy remembers that this life experience was inextricably bound up with her teaching. 'Miss Liliane’ told stories about her experiences to illustrate points and to reinforce movements in class, to engage her students as they practised. She remembers that, while warming up for pointe work in her later teenage years, longer stories were told, and this time became something more than practice. 'Miss Liliane’ knew everyone, had seen everything, or so it seemed, and had brought that world to Woodstock.
Amy also has strong memories of practising dance at home, in her family's large farmhouse dining room, which contained the record player and the piano. She would close the doors for privacy, move the dining room table to the side, put on the record player, and dance. She had, as she remembered it, no family present as an audience, but an imagined audience was there, in a particular place, watching. A significant memory and artifact from this performance history--and private performance is as important as any other--was a record in the house, of Broadway show tunes. She played this record endlessly when growing up, creating choreography based on everything she had seen and been taught, for an imagined audience. She still has that record; with the revival of the turntable, she can once again play those songs.
Amy is quite clear in her memories, that she wanted to grow up to be Karen Kain; but there was another very strong influence on her performance culture, and dance education. The 1980s was the heyday of Hollywood dance films, and she watched and imitated these outside of class, for herself and for performance in her primary and high school. The significant film was Dirty Dancing, which she watched repeatedly and, as a trained dancer, could mine for choreography. The choreographer, she told me, was Kenny Ortega, and all of the dances from that film, including briefer classroom-teaching scenes that are interspersed throughout, were all used to add to her personal repertoire. She remembered that--in an instance of pure serendipity--the local video store had a tape of Kenny Ortega teaching dance, which she borrowed many times, and deconstructed for use.
She did not keep all of this film-infused social dance choreography to herself. At school, as someone who had dance training, Amy was involved in the annual school musical, as performer and choreographer. In less-organized school cabarets, she and her regular partner, Travis Allison, learned and performed the dances that everyone watched on film. Amy talks also about high school dances, which were, not surprisingly, a significant part of the social life of a dancer, and she runs through the themes and rituals of this world briefly--graduations and proms, the 'Sadie Hawkins' dance, and more. And to tie the worlds of formal and informal dance training together, Amy ends by describing a surprise performance for 'Miss Liliane' by her senior dance students, who prepared a Dirty Dancing set for a recital, without her knowledge. Amy and her classmates came out in full costume, and invited their male partners up from the audience at the end of the evening.
As a Coda for this interview, Amy talked about her attendance at the theatre, which was rare, but all the more significant for that reason. Clearly dance was her passion and what she wanted to see. There was not much opportunity to see theatre, though her parents took her whenever the opportunity presented itself. Proving the importance of such opportunities--she remembers vividly having to miss a professional ballet performance as a child because of illness, and still has the well-thumbed program that was brought home to her. But it's significant, also, that her parents were inveterate theatre-goers, not to the Stratford Festival (though it was close at hand), but to London, Ontario, to the regional Grand Theatre Company, where she remembers, on special occasions, being taken as a child to see A Christmas Carol with Barry Morse, and Arsenic and Old Lace, with William Hutt and John Neville as the two aunts, among other performances, particularly with East-coast performers. Her parents, she believes, had learned to be regular theatre-goers in Newfoundland, where the London Theatre Company in St John's, run by Leslie Yeo, built an audience and provided a cultural connection with theatrical culture when they were growing up.
TRANSCRIPT
GATHERINGS: ARCHIVAL AND ORAL HISTORIES OF PERFORMANCE
First Gatherings Project; Interview with Amy Bowring by Stephen Johnson
On 21 July 2021. See website recording and introduction
Full consent given by both parties for posting.
***
[00:00:04.130] - Stephen
So we'll begin. Amy, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. And I sent you a package of materials beforehand. I just wanted at the beginning of this conversation to ask you if you've read the document that I sent and the material that's on the website about consent and that you understand it and that you agree to it.
[00:00:31.730] - Amy
Yes, I agree.
[00:00:33.270] - Stephen
Thank you. That's now official. And the next thing to do is to ask you for some information about yourself, if you can just say what you do now and how you're involved in the project, but then also just where you're from and the gist of what it is we're going to be talking about.
[00:00:57.060] - Amy
Okay. So right now, I am the executive and curatorial director of Dance Collection Danse, a place that I have worked at in some capacity since 1993, when I was still an undergraduate student. And I am originally from a little place called Innerkip, Ontario, which is in Oxford County. So Southwestern Ontario.
[00:01:27.010] - Stephen
Good. Thank you. For anybody watching this or anybody reading the transcript. They already know what the questions I sent you in advance. And there aren't questions that we have to stick to. I can tell you without any confidence at all, because it's there to see - we never stick to the questions once we start talking.
[00:01:52.570] - Amy
Right.
[00:01:53.690] - Stephen
But we might as well start with them. So if you can give me some sense of just you've described yourself and just your own training and education and your own and then just give a sense of when you first started attending performance in your life and where and how and what. Let's talk about that a little bit.
[00:02:16.640] - Amy
Yeah. Well, I was a farmer's daughter. So growing up in rural Ontario, there wasn't a whole heap of access to the performing arts. The dance school that I studied at from the age of seven, so that would have been 1978, was the Errington Graham School of Dance. It was located in London, Ontario, and it was one of those schools that basically had a base city and then each night of the week, the owner, the teachers, would travel to different other rural locations, where they had schools set up, usually in church halls.
[00:03:04.650] - Amy
So Woodstock was on Friday nights. They also did Sarnia, St. Thomas, Ingersoll, maybe even Tillsonburg at one point. At a certain point, they started to amalgamate them. But the school had actually been around since 1917, and it ran until 2015, and at this point, it still holds the records for longest continuously run dance school in Canadian history.
[00:03:35.150] - Stephen
I'm sorry. Until 2015?
[00:03:37.640] - Amy
Yeah. 98 years.
[00:03:40.330] - Stephen
That's amazing.
[00:03:41.500] - Amy
It is amazing. It went through two generations. So it started with Marion Stark Graham, who then later divorced Mr. Graham and became Mrs. Errington, and she had two sons. One of the sons danced and the girl that he married was another dancer. So hence the Errington Graham name of the school came from the two generations - the mom, Marion, and her husband, Richard Errington. And then they passed the school on to Liliane Marleau, who had married one of their sons. So two generations there. Marion started this school in 1917, basically as a teenager herself.
[00:04:35.450] - Amy
And at one point in the 1920s, she got a gig on the Publix Circuit, which was a vaudeville circuit. So she was touring for two years. But the school continued to be run by her cousin, a woman named Gladys Tullette. And every day she'd be writing lesson plans to her cousin mailed from wherever she was on the Publix. And then she came back and picked up the reins again. So in 1936, she created the London Theatre Ballet. And this was an amateur dance group that performed primarily in London but also did some tours out to smaller centres.
[00:05:29.090] - Amy
She was also invited by Harvey Robb; he was the head of the music conservatory at the University of Western Ontario. And it was called the Western Ontario Conservatory of Music. But it is basically what is now the Music Department at UWO. He invited her to create a syllabus, a ballet syllabus for the once-a-week rural student. And so she developed this pulling from the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), the Cecchetti system, Ned Wayburn's teachings. He was an American teacher [and choreographer].
[00:06:07.530] - Stephen
Oh, my goodness.
[00:06:08.730] - Amy
Yeah.
[00:06:09.950] - Stephen
I say that because I know he was a big vaudeville.
[00:06:15.250] - Amy
Yeah.
[00:06:15.620] - Stephen
Huge Broadway, Broadway choreographer.
[00:06:18.410] - Amy
Yeah. So she gathered the sort of the best of the best from those teaching syllabi and created the Western Ontario Conservatory of Ballet syllabus. And this would have been around 1938. So at this point, we're pretty sure this is the oldest ballet syllabus created in Canada. And it was designed for that once-a-week rural student, because usually if you're an RAD student now you take classes at least twice a week, three times when you get into the higher grades. But that's just not possible when you're going from, you know, you're traveling out 50 to 100 km each night to these different places.
[00:06:58.820] - Amy
And without that system, and we've seen it repeated in different parts of the country, rural students would have had no access to ballet training. I mean, for a long time, she was the only person coming to Woodstock and to some of these other places. So she developed that in the late ’30s. And in the ’40s, her London Theatre Ballet also had a troop show contingent that would tour the training bases and perform for soldiers before they headed overseas. So those troops show ran throughout the entire Second World War.
[00:07:44.630] - Amy
And then by 1949, the company was given a civic charter and became the London Civic Ballet Theatre, and is definitely the first and probably the only dance company in London, Ontario, to be given a civic charter. So then they were performing a lot in the 1950s, again in the sort of rural areas, doing one night run-outs to different little places and performing regularly in London. And she would go, whenever the Ballets Russes came to Toronto, she would spend a week at the Royal Alex watching their performances and taking notes.
[00:08:27.090] - Amy
And she also had a bit of a photographic memory when it came to restaging movement so she could set things. And then she would bring someone like Leon Danelian, for example. She'd bring a Ballets Russes dancer to London to clean up the work after she had set it. So they were doing things like Fokine’s Les Sylphides and Carnival and little dances like that. And they became part of the repertoire along with her own choreography. And so that company ran, I guess, until about the mid 1950s, ’55, ’56.
[00:09:05.940] - Amy
And then they just sort of concentrated on teaching at that point. So when I got there in the late 1970s, this whole history had existed. And when I was a kid growing up, Miss Liliane, as we called her, would tell us these stories. And some of the examiners that used to come out were people like Gweneth Lloyd and Bettina Byers and Boris Volkoff, so big names in ballet in Canada at that time, they were the examiners. And she would tell us these stories about touring and performing.
[00:09:49.610] - Amy
And I grew up with these stories. And I grew up hearing these names like Volkoff and Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant. And so by the time I got to university to study dance after high school – so I trained with her throughout my childhood and teenage years and then went to York to do the dance program there. When I got into my dance history class in first year, and we got to the Canadian part of it, I knew these names. I recognized these names, and I think that's part of what got me to where I am right now.
[00:10:34.830] - Amy
And the reason I know the history of the school so well is because my first job with Dance Collection Danse in 1993 was researching London, Ontario's dance history. And my dad was living there at the time, so I had somewhere to stay. So [DCD co-founders] Lawrence and Miriam sent me off to London, and I interviewed all kinds of different people who had been on the board or had performed in the company. I interviewed Dorothy Scruton and Bernice Harper and Dorothy Carter. So all of these people who were part of that early germination of ballet and dance in London, Ontario in that mid-20th-century period.
[00:11:21.670] - Amy
So it was an incredible learning experience. I spent time at the UWO archives because they have a playbill collection there. So I just spent days just combing through it, making records of what touring companies had come through because of the Grand Trunk Railway – it was a natural stop on the line.
[00:11:47.020] - Stephen
Right.
[00:11:47.270] - Amy
So the Ballets Russes performed there, and Ballet Theatre.
[00:11:50.770] - Stephen
And, oh, yes, I think we very much undervalue just how widely people toured, certainly across Southern Ontario, but really across Canada, because of the railway system. We think that it somehow started at a certain point, but in fact, it was more of a touring organization early on.
[00:12:17.740] - Amy
Yeah. Exactly. And there were way more stations than there are today.
[00:12:24.850] - Stephen
And railways.
[00:12:26.530] - Amy
Yeah. We have records in the archives of dancers outside the Whitby train station. And now that station is an art gallery because it's not used as a train station. But there's lots of little places like that that had stations that were stops. There would be a little theatre and a station and that made it a place to stop and perform.
[00:12:46.440] - Stephen
Yeah. Could I take you back a bit? There are a couple of questions I have based on everything that you've just said. I'd like to know if you can remember exactly where you went early on when you were taking dance. Was it a church basement and what did that church basement look like? And who else was there?
[00:13:12.340] - Amy
Right. So it was St. David's United Church on Springbank Avenue in Woodstock. And it was a modern church for the time. It had probably been built in the ’60s. And so the main floor, there was sort of that kind of typical community hall area that we used. Concrete floors. We had those wooden chairs that were typical of school classrooms. We took those chairs and spun them around and that was our barre. So you put your hand on the chair, and that was your barre.
[00:13:56.150] - Amy
And that's where we did our open houses. So that was kind of the recital that we did at the end of the year each spring. And so there was a little room off the main hall that we could change in. That was sort of our dressing room for recitals. And it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized this, but Miss Liliane would bring all the costumes. So it wasn't a situation where parents were forking over hundreds of dollars for costumes. She had a stack of costumes that she would bring.
[00:14:27.790] - Amy
She had hats and canes because we did ballet, tap and jazz. So she had all of these different costumes and props that could be used. And it wasn't until later, when I was looking at photos of the London Civic Ballet Theatre in the ’50s that I realized that those tutus were the tutus I wore as a teenager.
[00:14:49.070] - Stephen
Right.
[00:14:49.950] - Amy
And every time there was a little tear in the tulle, she would fix it by taking a little fabric flower on a wire and wrap so the little flower would cover up the tear and the tulle and the wire would sort of help pull the two edges together. And that was how things were fixed.
[00:15:11.390] - Stephen
So eventually the entire thing was just a mass of flowers. I mean, if it kept tearing-
[00:15:16.390] - Amy
Yeah. Over the years, they acquired more flowers.
[00:15:21.770] - Stephen
That's great.
[00:15:23.100] - Amy
But they were tastefully done. And she would add a few in non-tears so that there was some symmetry to what was going on.
[00:15:30.940] - Stephen
And you say that you didn't realize until much later. I think you just said that in the moment when you were young, you didn't really know that you were wearing history.
[00:15:43.310] - Amy
No, not at all.
[00:15:45.690] - Stephen
And maybe- Although you have said that many of these stories, you had these stories told to you. But were they during class, were they when you were younger, or was it a little older, perhaps when you started listening to these stories?
[00:16:01.670] - Amy
The stories were there. So I was only seven when I started. So I guess I remember the stories a bit later, they would pepper the class, right. Like something might happen in class that would remind her of something. Or she might tell a story to illustrate a point. And then when I was about 13 or 14 and I started to do pointe work, at the end of class, she would often – because it was a small class, it was like maybe five students – she would stretch our feet.
[00:16:35.460] - Amy
And in the process of her sitting there and stretching all of our feet, she had this captive audience. So that's what I really remember about the stories.
[00:16:46.670] - Stephen
That's very just the kind of image I'd be looking for. That's a very interesting- That you'd be sitting there stretching and then that's when she got to reminisce.
[00:16:59.090] - Amy
Exactly. And we were a captive audience. We were so engaged. And she was such a delightful and warm person anyway that you just wanted to be around her.
[00:17:11.510] - Stephen
And you say there were five, maybe five people.
[00:17:14.480] - Amy
Yeah. Maybe five or six.
[00:17:15.900] - Stephen
And was that true early on as well? When you [started], all the way through, or was it a larger group of people?
[00:17:21.130] - Amy
Definitely a bit like, the class size was probably at least twice that when I was younger and then you hit the teens and that's when you start to lose people, right. People become interested in boys and other stuff like that.
[00:17:35.940] - Stephen
Sure.
[00:17:36.440] - Amy
Right. It's just the hardcores who stay at it.
[00:17:40.610] - Stephen
Yeah. No, that's very interesting.
[00:17:43.910] - Amy
But yeah, it was every Friday night from the age of seven until I was 19. And sometimes we had – Friday nights were also the nights when high school dances happened. So sometimes we would have all of our dresses or outfits for going to a dance with us. And off we would go to the high school after class. Dance some more.
[00:18:10.590] - Stephen
And you know what, while we're on that, tell me about the school dances, because that's a part of your performance history.
[00:18:19.230] - Amy
Yeah. It's true. We probably had a school dance once a month sponsored by the student council. And they all had themes of some kind. So things were naturally attached to Christmas and Valentine's Day, and Halloween would be a dress up party. But there were also things like, I think November was the Sadie Hawkins dance, where it was appropriate for a girl to ask a boy to go to the dance. So this would be the mid to late ’80s that I was in high school. And then in March, there was usually a “Fun in the Sun” dance.
[00:18:57.540] - Amy
So even though it was really cold, you put on your shorts and your best sort of beach outfit and went. There would be semi-formal and then formal dances at Christmas. And then at the end of the year, that was the graduation dance. So the grade twelves and thirteens would do that one. And that was sort of their prom. So they'd get super dressed up.
[00:19:20.180] - Stephen
Right. And what kind of dance was that?
[00:19:24.030] - Amy
That would have a different theme. The proms always had, like Under the Sea, or there was one that was Phantom of the Opera when that was popular. And so someone would paint a mural and the decorations would reflect that.
[00:19:41.980] - Stephen
But the kind of dance was it- Not everybody present had taken ballet, tap and jazz, so they were just doing, honestly, I know the answer to this, but I'm just the interviewer. I remember Sadie Hawkins dances, which is a resonance idea. Boy, there's a lot to talk about there, but the whole idea that you'd go to this dance. Well, what kind of dance were you doing? Well, nobody had learned how to dance, right?
[00:20:23.600] - Amy
Yeah. So one of my close friends growing up was a boy named Travis Allison, and our farms were on different concessions. Our families were friends. And so we were close growing up. And his mother and my father had taught each of us how to, what we called, travel dance, right, where you actually moved around the room. So sometimes when I would dance with him, we could do that. But for the most part, the students for dancing, like typical ’80s teenagers where arms around the neck, the girl put her arms around your neck, and the boy put his arms around your waist, and you just kind of shuffled to the music.
[00:21:20.310] - Amy
That's the thing. Social dancing lessons didn't really exist anymore by that point. Right. By the ’80s. And so it was just the free form movement.
[00:21:37.410] - Stephen
Well, it's very interesting that you say that that's what I experienced as well. What social dance? I recall that there was briefly, in some organized fashion, sort of some vague notion of square dancing, which no one ever used.
[00:21:58.950] - Amy
No.
[00:21:59.860] - Stephen
And then a very basic sort of ballroom dancing as well. This would have been in, like, phys ed.
[00:22:06.950] - Amy
Yeah.
[00:22:08.410] - Stephen
I don't know if I'm only saying that about myself in case it triggers a memory with you. But otherwise, nothing.
[00:22:19.390] - Amy
The dance component in phys ed, I remember one year was learning a piece of choreography to the song Kung Fu Fighting.
[00:22:28.490] - Stephen
Great.
[00:22:29.930] - Amy
So to those of us who actually had dance lessons, it wasn't dancing.
[00:22:34.250] - Stephen
No.
[00:22:34.750] - Amy
But there were other outlets for us, like for example, there were high school musicals. And as one of a pretty small handful of people who had dance training, I managed to get the role of choreographer for those in my last two years of high school and also performed in them. And my friend Travis and I would do, like, the coffeehouse cabaret things. And basically, I was emulating things that I saw in the movies. When I was 16, Dirty Dancing came out and everybody loved that film. So I would just sort of emulate things that I saw on there.
[00:23:21.590] - Amy
And in fact, when I was in grade… so I guess it was grade twelve. It was after Dirty Dancing had come out, the girls that I took ballet, tap and jazz with with Miss Liliane, we got a group of boys together as our partners, boys that we had watched in phys ed and deemed to be fairly physically adept. And one of the girls happened to be the daughter of the Reverend for the United Church, for St. David's United Church. So she was able to get us into our dance studio, which was the church hall on other weekdays after school.
[00:24:04.610] - Amy
And that's when we would teach these boys. We just chose a song from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. And we emulated the dancing that we saw in that movie. We just sort of reconstructed it, created this choreography, did it all as a surprise. And so when we had our open house recital that year, the boys were in the audience, as if they were part of the families watching. And then right at the end, somebody secretly put on the music, and the boys came up, and we girls came out in our Dirty Dancing costumes.
[00:24:45.110] - Amy
And we did this dance for Miss Liliane as a surprise. And every time I saw her – because I stayed in touch with her right up until she passed away in 2008 – she talked about that. She always talked about that. It was one of those great moments for her where her students had snuck off and done choreography in secret and presented it at our open house.
[00:25:13.560] - Stephen
That's a great story. Just very interesting. And it brings together, to me, it brings together the dancing that you're taking, the fact that you're in a school, a private school, taking dance. But then having this social dance phenomenon that's going on and you're marrying those two, which is a relatively, I think, unusual thing to do, although maybe not so much in the musical part. The high school musical is, I think it's figured prominently in almost every interview I've done so far, because it's so much a part of public school culture. Whether it's attendance or involvement.
[00:26:00.900] - Stephen
And in your case, it would be involvement, the fact that you had a leg up, so to speak, because you were coming in and you were a pro, you could choreograph and dance. Yeah. I just want to go back two minutes when you say you and Travis danced in something. A coffee. Something.
[00:26:23.720] - Amy
Yeah. It was called a coffee house.
[00:26:26.630] - Stephen
Wow.
[00:26:28.610] - Amy
So the cafeteria was set up, the tables were set up and a little stage was set up, and there would be singing, dancing, instrument playing, that kind of thing.
[00:26:42.750] - Stephen
So it was a small, informal variety show.
[00:26:45.570] - Amy
Yeah. Exactly.
[00:26:46.330] - Stephen
It was informal, I mean, someone organized it, but it was student led, and you had to sign up in advance to go out?
[00:26:56.440] - Amy
Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:00.390] - Stephen
Dancing that the two of you did in that environment, were they things that you got off television, picked up wherever you picked it up from?
[00:27:11.330] - Amy
Yeah. So again, it was, so, in Dirty Dancing there are many, many scenes where Patrick Swayze and his partner are instructing social dance classes, salsa, fox trot, things like that. So that was what we wanted to emulate. So that's all Kenny Ortega's choreography. So I stole pieces of his choreography and put them into something new for the two of us that we could do.
[00:27:40.170] - Stephen
Great.
[00:27:41.110] - Amy
But there happened to be at the local video store, I found a how-to video from Kenny Ortega on how to salsa, how to do a few different things. So I watched that and taught myself how to do some of these dances and then taught Travis how to do them. And then we did them at the coffee house.
[00:28:07.490] - Stephen
I'm not speechless, but I am speechless. I think that's just so interesting to me, and it's interesting to me because of the serendipity of it. If Dirty Dancing hadn't come out, where would you all have been? And if there didn't happen to be a video tape - and I also love that it's a video tape completely. You can't even get a machine anymore. No, this is a video tape which was probably worn out even by the time you looked at it. Right. And so who knows what the speed was like when you were playing it and you were learning these dances and it happened to be there.
[00:28:47.900] - Stephen
And if I hadn't been there, that would have changed things. I just find the serendipity of all of this really interesting. And one other thing about what you just said is how these small snippets- I've seen Dirty Dancing more than once, and I don't remember, it isn't burned into my memory- the small parts when Patrick Swayze is teaching people how to social dance, but it is to you. And you took those parts out.
[00:29:21.500] - Amy
Yeah. I was an impressionable 16-year-old when it came out. And it hit me at a time when – because for a long time growing up, I wanted to be Karen Kain. I wanted to be a ballet dancer. And I auditioned for the National Ballet School and for the RWB School when I was a kid and didn't get into either, because I don't actually have a ballet body, and flexibility is something I always struggled with. But after those disappointments, Ms. Liliane said to me, ballet is not the only type of dance that you can do.
[00:29:59.780] - Amy
There are a lot of other types of dance that you can have a career at. And that was quite a eureka moment for me, to hear those words and realize, okay, just keep doing it and have faith that somehow it will turn out in the end, that somehow if you keep this ambition that you will get to where you want to be. And so some of those movies, those dance movies of the ’80s, came out at a time when I was starting to realize that maybe it was possible to have a career in the arts, even if you were from a small farming community. That that didn't have to dictate what you could be.
[00:30:50.670] - Amy
This place that you were growing up in that had very little in the way of arts. And certainly it wasn't promoted largely at my high school, other than the musicals. I was one of the kids who, growing up in an 1865 big farmhouse, we had a formal dining room, and that's where the record player was and the piano that I learned to play on. And so as a kid, I would push the dining room table and the chairs off to one side of the room and then I had floor space for dancing and creating choreographies.
[00:31:32.370] - Amy
I had a record album that I still have. It was Broadway hits, and it was given to me as a gift. It had things like Joel Gray singing, Wilkommen from Cabaret, and it had Ethel Merman singing from Gypsy. Right. So I played this album all the time. Sweet Charity was on there, and I just would make up dances to these songs in my dining room, sometimes using the piano as a prop, and just create worlds and these choreography.
[00:32:13.910] - Stephen
And did you I mean, what age, I mean, right through or early on?
[00:32:18.800] - Amy
Yeah, from eight to high school. It wasn't just that Broadway album. There were other things, too. But mostly that Broadway album.
[00:32:31.140] - Stephen
That's very interesting and great that you still have it. Boy, there's a historical artifact.
[00:32:35.880] - Amy
Well, this was the thing that I kept it because it was so meaningful, even though I eventually didn't have a record player. And then just a few years ago, my older teenage son wanted a record player because vinyl was coming back into popularity. So I've been able to put that back on again. It's been great to just reminisce and have those nostalgia moments with this particular album.
[00:33:02.050] - Stephen
Yeah, that's great. And when you were dancing at home, that's an interesting image to me that- I grew up in an 1860 farm house and also a very small one. But to have that, the record player was there in the dining room and the dining room and the everything's all in one room, and you can move it aside. And there's your studio. Did you have an audience when you were doing that, or did everybody actually go away? It's a thing that comes into my head to ask, because I think a lot of people have that experience.
[00:33:45.830] - Stephen
Do you have privacy?
[00:33:48.410] - Amy
So the dining room had two doors, one to the hallway and one to the kitchen, and I would close both doors and nobody ever came in. I mean, my dad was probably off in the fields or off in the barn. My older brother was probably with him, my little brother was probably playing Lego and couldn't care less what I was doing. And my mom was busy running a household. So it was my private space. And I didn't really want an audience. I wouldn't necessarily go and get my mom and say, “Okay, watch what I can do.”
[00:34:17.430] - Stephen
No, I understand.
[00:34:19.140] - Amy
It was just my space. And it definitely was kind of like this private world for me.
[00:34:26.360] - Stephen
But I'm going to take a guess. And I say this only because it only has dawned on me in the last few years. Somebody- They could all hear everything you were doing.
[00:34:37.390] - Amy
Yeah.
[00:34:39.050] - Stephen
And I always remember whenever I did anything in my room, any kind of performance, anything like that, it never occurred to me that everything I did could be heard. I really did feel private, out of sight, out of mind. But the flip side of that is that sometimes you're so wrapped up in the performance you do, you don't care who's around. You don't even notice.
[00:35:01.970] - Amy
Yeah. Well, and to me, in that space, that was my stage. And I envisioned an audience, right. Like I knew where front was. And it really was an imaginary theatre for me. And I really performed in there like I was performing for an audience, for sure.
[00:35:25.270] - Stephen
Yes. Well, that's very interesting. I'd like to turn now just for a few moments to performances that you attended. So you've been talking about yourself as performer and what about yourself as audience member?
[00:35:42.930] - Amy
Yeah. I grew up parented by two pre-confederation Newfoundlanders and so in the ’40s and ’50s, they had grown up with the London Theatre Company, Leslie Yeo and that crowd. And every season they would come to St. John's, and they would perform actually in my dad's school, Bishop Feild School [sic]. They would perform there and my parents grew up watching them, so my parents always appreciated theatre. Originally, when my parents moved from Newfoundland in 1969, they actually lived in Oakville; my dad worked in Toronto for the family business.
[00:36:33.220] - Amy
And then in 1975, he decided to become a farmer. So that was when we moved to Innerkip. And right from the get go, they were season’s ticket holders to the Grand Theatre in London. So I don't know, once a month, maybe they went to the theatre and a babysitter came to look after the three of us. And then occasionally we would get to go, too. Or if one of them was sick, I got to go because I was the one who was more interested in performing arts than my brothers were, so usually I got to go.
[00:37:17.710] - Amy
I have two very specific Grand Theatre performances in my head, and I don't know which one I saw first or if they were in the same season because in my mind, they're all around the same time period. But Barry Morse did A Christmas Carol, and my parents went to see it as their season’s ticket holders and loved it so much that they thought the three of us should go see it. So they bought a whole other set of tickets and off we went to see Barry Morse as Scrooge. But also around that same time they did Arsenic Old Lace and Bill Hutt and John Neville played the Aunts in drag.
[00:38:04.540] - Amy
And they thought it was so wonderful again, they thought, oh, the children really must see this. And they brought us all to that. I can also remember them taking us to performances. Sometimes there would be performances for kids and youth. In the bottom part of the Grand, there's sort of like a small black box theatre that I feel like was in the basement. I remember you had to go downstairs to get to it and Charlie Tomlinson did something. And of course, whenever there were Newfoundlanders around that were theatre people, we were notified, like, every time Gordon Pinsent came on the television, it was, “Look, kids, Gordon Pinsent, come and see, come and see the Newfoundlanders.”
[00:38:53.230] - Amy
So yeah, I remember Charlie Tomlinson doing something. I guess he must have been – maybe he directed it, I don't remember if he performed it. I think it had to do with Dunkirk. I think it was a play that was somehow about Dunkirk and the Channel. Anyhow, I only have vague memories of it so I must have been pretty little when I saw it. But, yeah, that was an important part of our growing up years – that they got us to the theatre. I also remember seeing Eric Wolfe perform when I was a kid, and he was my age.
[00:39:31.140] - Amy
So that was an interesting moment for me to see a kid my own age, performing in a real theatre, a proper theatre. And I saw him a few times in different things. So it was clear that one could do this, even if you were a kid. Yeah, there was potential for that. And then occasionally, the National Ballet of Canada would tour through. Actually, the very first time that they came – the first time that I was going to be taken, they were doing Giselle at the Grand.
[00:40:13.580] - Amy
It was the winter time, and in the week or so leading up to this theatre experience, my mom had the flu and she kept saying to me, “Don't come near me. You'll get sick, you've got to stay away.” And of course, little kid, I just wanted to hug my mom, be with my mom. She kept saying, you've got to stay away. And sure enough, the night or two before we were to go to the theatre I got the flu. My mom said I had a fever.
[00:40:47.030] - Amy
My mom said, “There's no way I can't take you. We're sitting in a box with other people. You could get them infected. You just can't come.” And I went upstairs, I put on my dress, my tights, my Mary Janes and I was like, ready to go to the theatre. And she said, “I just can't take you.” And I cried, and I cried, and I cried. And of course, my older brother got to go in my place, which was insult to injury, right. But she did bring me back a souvenir program, which I still have, which is completely dog-eared and falling away from its binding.
[00:41:29.670] - Amy
Because I poured through that thing, I memorized every dancer that was in it. This would be like the 79/80 season. I memorized certain bios like this thing was precious, beyond precious to me.
[00:41:51.770] - Stephen
I can understand the insult, adding insult to injury that your brother went to. Probably.
[00:41:59.010] - Amy
He did like it, which was good. And he would tell me that his favorite thing was when they 'diddle-diddled' across the stage, which means the bourrée. And, of course, in Giselle there's tons of that in the second act of bourréeing across the stage as if floating ethereal creatures across the mist.
[00:42:22.470] - Stephen
Yes. And is that what he called it? Diddle-diddle? So he did tell you about it.
[00:42:28.880] - Amy
Oh, he did tell me about it, yeah, and he did enjoy it.
[00:42:37.330] - Stephen
The importance of that artifact. Well, it's just so important to me because in effect, you created the performance.
[00:42:48.970] - Amy
Yeah. Right.
[00:42:50.200] - Stephen
By going through it in that way, you imagined it just as surely as if you were there. And it was a completely different thing. But it's still a performance.
[00:43:02.660] - Amy
Yeah.
[00:43:03.140] - Stephen
Well, that's very interesting. Yeah. Maybe we're reaching an end to this. I don't know if there was anything else that you specifically wanted to mention or wanted to talk about.
[00:43:17.460] - Amy
Well, I would say that I thought the theatre was a very magical place. The Grand Theatre with the boxes and the mural above the proscenium. I thought this place was like a palace, some of those gilded moldings and that kind of thing. And so I remember, as a young kid just thinking, what a magical place this was. The lobby was – that was modern. That was humdrum. But when you went through those doors into this sort of gilded space – that made a huge impression on me. And I thought this was a very magical place to be.
[00:44:04.210] - Stephen
As compared with the church basement or many of the other places that you're in. You are also not the only one to describe that specifically. And just in the people I've talked with, just the idea of walking into that space, even just this last part you said, the idea that the lobby not so much, but you open those doors, you went into this space you are walking into another world. That's very interesting.
[00:44:33.120] - Amy
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:44:36.230] - Stephen
But unusual or rare. And maybe that's part of why it was special is that it was rare because it wasn't a place where you performed. No, this was a place that you performed. But this was not the place where you performed. Which I guess reinforces when you mentioned the performer who was your age, that perhaps gave you the idea that you might possibly perform in a space like that.
[00:45:10.960] - Amy
Yeah. Exactly. Seeing him as a person my own age in that space, it did kind of make things real and sort of like, “Okay, this is a possibility. I can continue to aspire to this. This might happen one day if I just keep working at it.” Not knowing how things would go or that an injury would change that trajectory. But still, it made it possible. It made it feasible in my mind.
[00:45:44.890] - Stephen
Well, I think that this is a good place is to end. And I want to thank you very much. And thanks a lot for doing this. I really appreciate it.
[00:45:55.480] - Amy
My pleasure.
