Aaron Todd Douglas is the Director of the University of Minnesota’s BFA Actor Training Program. A winner of the International Ibsen Scholarship, Douglas has previously worked as an actor, director and playwright in theaters around Chicago. This year, Douglas committed the BFA program to participating in the Jubilee season.
“The Jubilee season was launched so that all marginalized populations, BIPOC, queer populations, performers with disabilities, all those populations, are to be highlighted, and it was structured in a way, professional theaters across the country as well as university theaters, you were supposed to articulate your own growing edge.
The growing edge that we set for this season was to feature BIPOC artists and women. And the goal was to be at least at 50%. And that can be challenging because this program has a reputation as being an exceptionally strong training ground for so-called ‘classical’ actors. The problem I have with that, I love that reputation, but the term ‘classical’ is steeped in white supremacy.
It’s not about celebrating dead white guys, it is about texts that endure, it’s about heightened language. It’s about the richness of imagery in the writing, it’s about the themes, the grand epic themes of man versus nature, of man versus God, members of society, man versus man. All of those things are what we are actually celebrating when we celebrate so-called ‘classical’ work.
So if we sort of change our view and change the words that we use to describe things, then we are actually moving that needle, we’re actually the change that we talk about, the change that we wish to see, we can absolutely embody that.
I’ve hired probably 300% representation, as opposed to what it had been in the past. So, I take a lot of pride in that because we have to normalize it. It is far too common to see nothing but white directors and white teachers in a program like this, and that’s simply unacceptable, and it’s about the doing of it.”
Interviewed by Skylar Wolfe