Veteran Rosebud actors nominated for Betty Mitchell Award

Times Reporter

 

The Calgary theatre community’s version of the Oscars is how veteran Rosebud actor Karl Sine describes the Betty Mitchell Award. Sine and his friend and colleague Nathan Schmidt were both nominated for the prestigious award. On Aug. 8 there was a gala held at Stage West in Calgary to present the awards.  

“It’s kind of like the Calgary theatre community’s version of the Oscars I guess,” said Sine. 

“It’s an award ceremony to celebrate the excellence in theatre and performance and it’s just an opportunity for the community to get together and acknowledge one another for the good works. It’s a pretty exciting thing to be nominated and recognized by that community.”

The Betty Mitchell Awards, named for a pioneer of Calgary’s theatrical community, Dr. Mitchell, were started in 1998 to celebrate and honour outstanding achievement in Calgary’s professional theatre community. Each year the Betty Mitchell Awards provide the opportunity for theatre artists to come together and recognize the excellent work that takes place on Calgary stages.

The men were jointly nominated for their work on The Shakespeare Company’ Macbeth for outstanding choreography or fight direction. 

Fight direction is choreography of fight scenes. The main goal is to pull off a realistic looking fight while keeping the actors safe. 

Sine said fight direction in a lot of ways is a fairly new thing, but at the same time is something that society sees a lot of. He has been involved in theatre since he was young, but professionally as a fight director he has been involved in it for seven years. He said the first few years were a big learning curve and the past five years have been about putting the skills to good work. 

Both Sine and Schmidt have worked together in the past, and are both based out of Rosebud which is how they met. 

“Both of us kind of caught the fight direction bug at the same time and learned together in a lot of ways, and that’s part of what makes working with Nathan so wonderful. We have a vocabulary and a rapport together that’s pretty unique…we’ve known each other for so long and it allows our work to really hum,” said Sine.

Sine said they didn’t think about being nominated while working. He said both he and Schmidt were proud to be working on the project, and both enjoy working with the Shakespeare Company but neither thought about winning anything. Schmidt echoed his colleague’s thoughts. 

“I don’t think it’s ever anything you want to really expect and put your focus on doing that sort of thing. I knew that the work we did was good, and I knew that people were responding to it and that we were really happy with the fighters that we had,” said Schmidt.

“We’ve gotten to work with a few of them more than once so you develop a language with them so you can move a little further forward than when you are all trying to learn each other in one go. 

“I didn’t put a lot of focus on it, but now that we got it it’s a cool thing, it’s really great to be recognized by peers that the work you’ve done is of value and good,” 

“Everything just kind of hummed on that project and both of us were just extremely proud of it in the end,” said Sine. 

Schmidt said he used to swordfight with cousins and friends when he was younger. He thought it would be great if it could be his job, but doubted it would be possible. Then when he went to theatre school he realized it was a profession. 

Schmidt is also a company member with Rosebud Theatre and is the Head of Acting for the Rosebud School of the Arts. Schmidt can be seen in ‘Jake and the Kid’ and ‘the Diary of Adam and Eve’.

Unfortunately the two men did not receive the Betty Mitchell Award, but both were happy just to have been nominated.