Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1996 - 38

Newton's vision

was to create a true ensemble
out of what he considered to be
smaall
summer festiva~
which

had potential.
advennlrousness for the next generation of Canadian designers.
Porteous talks about his art and his accomplishments
with a down-to-earth humor that reflects his western Canada
upbringing. Christopher Newton calls him "a son of the soil."
Porteous, typically, is less lyrical: "I'm a prairie seed," he
says.
The style of his conversation mirrors Porteous's approach to design. He tells stories in dialogue, laced \\~th ~\~d
images. People interest him as much as ideas. As a designer
he takes the sanle starting point: characters in a sinlation,
talking. The theatrical em~ronment evolves from the essence
of the conversation.
For our conversations at the Festival, the designer
perches on an armless swivel chair in his long narrow office
with a soaring ceiling. Light from a row of clerestory windows
floods the white walls. Models and drawings spread across a
counter spanning one wall. On the floor, framed photographs
and mounted sketches lean against filing cabinets.
Porteous recalls that he was teaching in the summer
progranl at the Banff Centre of Fine Arts when Newton asked
him to join his new venture at the Shaw. "Christopher met me
on the banks of the Bow River in Calgary, asked me to come.
I said, without hesitation, that I would come. I knew the time
was right. His \~sion was to create a true ensemble out of
what he considered to be a small summer festival which had
potential. He wanted a place where really great actors, coming out of the regions after their winter seasons, could gather,
and we could explore nineteenth century literanlre. Cluistopher is a nineteenth centuly man. He's a turn-of-the-centulY
man; he exists somewhere between 1860, 1880 and 1907.
That's always where he's most comfortable."
Porteous was born in 1937 in Rosetown, Saskatchewan,
and grew up an only child on the family farm. The look of the
landscape and the isolation of rural life have shaped both his
artistic \~sion and his practical approach to theatre.
"The nearest neighbor was five miles away," Porteous
says. "There were no trees for 360 degrees, other than the
ones my grandfather had planted, and they were only so high.
Since I didn't have brothers and sisters or many playmates, I
bounced tennis balls off barns to play ball, and I learned to
play with the animals and chickens. I created imaginmy
worlds. By the time I was heading into my teens, it was fairly
ob~ous to evelybody that I had a knack for drawing and
painting. When there'd be an old bit of oil paint I could
scramble up, I'd get up on a ladder and paint these frescoes
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on the sides of bmlls, terrific horror things, comic book stuff,
you know, dripping hands of blood."
The boyhood themes can still be seen in Porteous' work:
great openness, three-dimensional forms placed emphatically
in space, and graphic imagely on a Im'ge scale.
When it becanle clear that young Cameron was not going
to become a farmer, his parents moved to Vancouver, to give
him a better education than Rosetown's one-room school
house offered. In the city, his father, who had been a retail
merchant before taking over his \\~e's fanilly fm'm, managed a
shoe department and renewed his own artistic interests.
"He was a fabulous singer, a wonderful tenor," Porteous
says, "and he got involved in music societies, which he
dragged me into. In Vancouver at that particular time, like so
many places, theatre was something you did in your spare
time, after you sold cigarettes or liquor or shoes. At night
you'd go out to the localtheatlical society and perform, either
minstrel shows or scenes from H.M.S. Pinafore and Naugbty
Marietta."
The teenager's technical talents gained him a place in
one of the groups. "I got involved because of my ability to
paint and build. I was fairly good at those things when I left
the farm. I helped my father build bm"ns, I knew how to saw
wood, I knew how to fit windows, even at thirteen yem"s of age.
At fourteen, I was dri~ng two-ton wheat trucks with special
permits from the Mounties. So all those skills that I had as a
child on the farm on the prairies, I suddenly focused towards
fun, and theatre was fun."
His pragmatic mother encouraged him to go into a scientific career, and for a time P0I1eous's curiosity and love of invention pointed him towm"ds chemical engineering. "But then a
funny thing happened," he says, \\~th the robust laugh timt punctuates his conversation. "I failed the chemistry test! And tilat was
tile end of my pursuits of going into chemistI)'. I was told by so
many tutors tilat you're not cut out for this, you're really cut out
for tile tileatI"e."
PoI1eous applied to the tileatI"e progranl at the niversity of
Washington, but before he could enroll, he was offered a job as a
scene painter at the C:lI1adian Broadcasting Company's new
Vancouver tele~sion operation. He opted for on-tile-job training,
supplemented \~til evening courses at tile Vancouver School of
Applied and Decorative A11.
His mentor at the CBC was George Yates. "He was trained
in the old, nineteenth centmy traditions of scenic art. I know
things about scenic m"t that many of tile young people coming
up haven't got a clue exist. When I went to Cesky Krumlov [the

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