Arizona Repertory Theatre

Professional Actor Training Company

Brent Gibbs, Artistic Director

The Arizona Repertory Theatre is unique and special, serving as the public laboratory and showcase of the Department Theatre Arts' professional training programs. The performers who constitute the resident actor training company are students from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program in acting, musical theatre and the Master of Fine Arts program in acting. Being in one of these degree programs means being in the ART company, and vice-versa. The company is modeled directly after professional examples such as the large classical repertory theatres in the USA, Canada, England, and Europe. Students function as young professionals in a setting where the rules and discipline of the contemporary theatre are observed. Operating rules are modeled after those of the Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States. The repertoire is selected primarily from classical and musical works, and is designed to serve as the integral extension of the student's classroom study and studio training.

Roles are assigned by the entire acting/directing area faculty rather than by any one individual director. Our goal is to ensure that each student has opportunit8ies to train, grow, and perfect his/her techniques in a variety of styles and genres. The focus is on individual student development rather than commercial 'type casting'. We aim to train versatile, self-sufficient theatre artists. Our acting training emphasizes Stanislavski based process skills, period style and classical texts, voice and movement skills, stage combat, screen acting, and musical theatre. Our productions are noted for their high quality and ambitious scale, and our students leave the program with an honest view of themselves as actors as well as solid preparation and marketable skills for a difficult and demanding profession. Our graduates are well placed in the professional world and academic theatre throughout the country and abroad.

Through the ART actor training company, we are able to combine the best elements of an acting conservatory and a resident professional theatre on a university campus. Our students are trained in a rigorous, coherent, and disciplined setting and subsequently showcased in a highly visible public context, and, as a result, our audiences are able to enjoy productions of first rate quality.

The newest innovation for ART actors is our annual Showcase. The faculty strongly hold the position that we have a responsibility to ease and assist the students' transition from the academic to the professional world. To this end, every year we hold a Showcase of Talent. Industry professionals, such as producers, directors, agents, and casting directors from Arizona and across the country are invited to Tucson to view the work of students who are near graduation. We began this program in March of 1996, and were thrilled by the attendance of talent agents from New York City, theatre directors from Chicago, California, Phoenix, and Tucson, and casting directors and film producers from Arizona and the West Coast. Through this Showcase, students are able to make important industry contacts. We look forward to continuing and extending this program as a highlight of our training.

Students come to our program from all across the country. We are very proud of the quality of our students, the work they produce while at the U of A, and the many successes they have had since graduation. The concept of the ART is relatively new, but we feel that it is a logical outgrowth of the excellent and exciting work that has been done in this department. We hope that our efforts build upon the past achievements of all those who have worked before us, while at the same time provide a model of education and training for the new century.