For stage veteran and educator Quincy Armorer, theatre is life

For more than three decades, Quincy Armorer, BFA 97, has delighted in treading the boards. “I can’t not have theatre in my life,” says the co-director of the English-language acting program at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal.

Armorer already felt this way when he enrolled in Concordia’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Performance (now called Acting for the Theatre) at age 18, having “had a blast” in grade-school and high-school shows. His BFA was a coming-of-age experience, he says. “When you’re training as an actor, you and your body are the instrument. It’s vulnerable: you have to be open and brave. You learn a lot about yourself.”

As a result, Armorer bonded with many of his classmates. “The people I met at Concordia are essentially my second family,” he affirms. “I’m grateful for my time there, and thrilled to see that the theatre department is still going strong.”

A self-described “Shakespeare nerd,” Armorer has enthusiastically taken on many classical roles over the years. But he’s also interested in newer plays and served for 10 years as the artistic director of Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop (BTW). As Canada’s longest running Black theatre company, BTW champions the work of Black playwrights and stories that are relevant to Black cultures and experiences. During Armorer’s tenure, it expanded its audience to include a new generation of young theatregoers and made a name for itself beyond its home city.

For instance, in 2015, BTW collaborated with the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to produce The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, an epic-scale musical drama set in a historical Black community in Ontario. “That production won a bunch of awards and made the company into more of a household name,” says Armorer. “For me, it was a reminder of how important these stories [from minority communities] are, and how audiences really do want to hear them.”