Students experience Shakespeare in North York.
Professional actor Dion Johnstone, right, and William Lundy, 14, work together during the Shakespearience summer camp acting workshop held Monday at Claude Watson School for the Performing Arts.
Staff photo/TIM FORAN
'It really opens your eyes to what's possible within you' - Stratford's Dion Johnstone
Dion Johnstone's acting life has spanned almost two decades and 'the wheel has come full circle'.
As a youngster in Edmonton, one at the time more interested in jazz music, the junior high student garnered a role in the Citadel Theatre's teen-only production of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona. And the now 34-year-old Stratford veteran, currently starring as Caliban alongside famed actor Christopher Plummer in the critically acclaimed production of The Tempest, will once again appear in the Bard's early comedy later this summer.
Over the past 20 years, he has played more than a dozen roles in Shakespeare plays, a fate not even a witch could have foretold when Johnstone was reading Macbeth and As You Like It in grades 7 and 8.
"It was very dry and very dreary. You couldn't understand the play and I didn't have a lot of love for Shakespeare," Johnstone admitted Monday, July 19 during a break in his duties as guest instructor at the Shakespearience Performing Arts's summer drama camp at the Toronto school board's Claude Watson School for the Performing Arts near Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue.
"But performing it at the teen festival and seeing what this language was like when it's brought to life, especially the imagery that's contained in it and the mythological aspects of the stories were mind-blowing for me."
Connecting Shakespeare to students with the same attitude as the young Johnstone is the raison d'etre of the 12-year-old Shakespearience program.
"The whole idea is to demystify Shakespeare for the kids so they're not afraid of him anymore," explained executive director and actor, Marvin Karon.
But that doesn't mean rewriting what might be read by newcomers as the impenetrable and distant words and language of early modern English. Rather, the company uses acting to flesh out the visceral rhythm and flow of Shakespeare's lines.
"There's something contained in the actual act of speaking the word and hearing the word - receiving the word - that you don't get from simply reading it," described Johnstone. "You actually need to voice it to allow the sounds that are inherent in the language to reverberate within you, and then they begin to have a transformative effect."
At Shakesperience's summer experience camp, an almost month-long program offered free of charge to under-resourced adolescents thanks to the assistance of sponsors, the metamorphosis is easy to see take place in just weeks, said Karon. Attendees from across Toronto - "not all, but a good chunk are very, very poor," he noted - start the camp struggling with the text of the plays and wondering if they'll ever learn their lines. In a matter of weeks, they're off book and spitting Shakespeare, if you will.
"You just watch their faces, they're absolutely thrilled and delighted at how far they've come," said Karon, who is preparing his group for a performance of a trio of scenes from Macbeth at the Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley Street Theatre on July 29.
"It totally helps me," quoth one of Banquo's treacherous murderers, a.k.a Dani Sarraga, a 12-year-old Scarborough resident and St. Elizabeth Seton elementary school student. "Just by acting (the play)...it helps me look at it in a different perspective."
Her older colleague, Bryan Chu, said it is the acting bug that has drawn him back to the summer camp five years in a row.
"It's the feeling, being onstage, holding an audience," said the 17-year-old Earl Haig high school student from North York.
That's the same feeling that has drawn Johnstone to return to the stage throughout his lifetime.
"It's the sense of empowerment, to find yourself in the skin of someone else accessing parts of yourself that you never knew that you had," he said. "And when you do that in front of other people and you reach a level of confidence with it, and you get that feedback from the audience, that response, a lot of these kids - and certainly in my experience up to that point - have never felt that before.
"It really opens your eyes to what's possible within you."