Barry Freeman, who attended UTSC for undergrad and currently works in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media as an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance, recalls how the commitment of UTSC Professor Michal Schonberg allowed him to have an extraordinary experience abroad as an undergrad.
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0:05
Another big thing that happened that’s significant in terms of history, and that was really big for me and the whole group of students, was that Michal Schonberg founded a big international project.
0:16
So we referred to it as the ‘Prague Project,’ so he’s Czech and he had connections in the Czech Republic, in Prague. And so in 1998 he started this theatre project that would involve a group in Prague,
0:31
students working with a group here on campus in our theatre program, and that was when I was in my third year, so it kind of hit at exactly the right time for me to take advantage of it.
0:42
And it was incredible, and he fundraised, he built this whole thing himself. He fundraised and found the money to pay for all of us, we didn’t have to pay for this whole experience, a group of 18 students or something the first time we did it,
0:55
to go to Prague, we worked with a bunch of actors and students there and created something, and then we performed it in Prague in a professional theatre, and then they all came to Toronto and performed it here.
1:09
That happened in 1999, so it’s actually the 20th anniversary of that [in 2019], and he went on to do that three more times, I was involved each time.
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And so I developed, myself and this huge group of people, it was with a different group of students each time, so between 1998 and 2006,
1:28
this big group of students from here got this really wild international experience that was like mind blowing! I just came back from Prague last week, like I still go there
1:40
because I have friends there and connections there, I went to live there for half a year, it played a part in me going to grad school, and you know I wrote about it, and you know it became a huge part of my life, actually.
1:51
That professor’s effort to do that kind of out of the box, like really odd thing, and all on his own time, in a late part of his career. It’s amazing and I don’t even know how to frame it.
2:05
I mean it’s testament to what I was saying earlier about the kinds of people who are here who love this place, because really,
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this guy could only have done that out of love, he was literally not being paid one red penny to do any of that.
2:21
He did it because he loved the idea and he knew that it would be really mind-blowing for his students to have that experience, those people and school that we worked with were unbelievable! And it was, I know a whole group of people whose lives were changed.
