Studio 58, the legendary theatre school tucked into the basement of Langara College, is celebrating its 50th anniversary in style. Not only did the program throw a star-studded bash on September 12, but Mayor Gregor Robertson officially proclaimed that day “Studio 58 Day in the City of Vancouver”.

It’s a fitting tribute to a program that has helped change the landscape of Vancouver’s theatre scene, thanks to alumni who are bold, brazen DIY innovators, capable of everything from acting and set-building to costuming and starting their own companies upon graduation. To mark its half-century, Studio 58 wanted to bring the past into its present—and maybe put into motion some future collaborations.

“We wanted to have as many graduates involved in one way or another,” says Kathryn Shaw, Studio 58’s artistic director, sitting in her small office on Langara’s main floor. This means that grads and current students are writing shows, students are acting opposite professional actors, and grads have been hired to design and direct.

Former grad and 2010 Siminovitch Protégé Prize winner Anita Rochon directs the first show of the milestone anniversary season, Shakespeare’s beloved Romeo and Juliet, which Studio 58 is billing as Romeo + Juliet this time out. Rochon didn’t have to look too far for inspiration about how to approach the iconic tragedy.

“I began to contemplate: what would it have been like to be a theatre student 50 years ago?” Rochon says over the phone from her Vancouver home. “What was the world like 50 years ago, when this little hub started incubating students? So we set it in 1965.

“What really resonated with us was it was the birth of youth culture and people were talking about youth culture for the first time,” Rochon continues. “Of course, teenagers have always been different than the older generation, but it was more pronounced and more defined in the media than it ever had been before. That felt really relevant, these two young lovers, these teenagers, who fall in love and they’re the new world and their parents are the old world, and so we set in 1965, New York City, in and around Andy Warhol’s Factory.”

The 50th-anniversary season also paints an accurate portrait of the program’s legacy of reinvention and challenging the status quo. Romeo + Juliet reframes the central romance between two girls. There’s an emphasis on new work (The Crowd, commissioned with Green Thumb Theatre from famed playwright George F. Walker) and unconventional work. (The Risky Night series will feature an adaptation of Madame Bovary with a full-size French poodle in the title role.) And there’s a breaking-free from traditional theatre spaces. Flee premieres at the Fox Cabaret, the first play the venue has ever hosted. It’s a production of Studio 58 and, arguably, the program’s biggest professional postgrad success story: Electric Company Theatre.

Founded by Kim Collier, David Hudgins, Jonathon Young, and Kevin Kerr in 1996, Electric Company has been a leading force in Vancouver theatre. Ingenious and spectacular, its projects tend to be wildly intellectual, emotional, and creative affairs that challenge conventional staging. They have helped change Vancouver’s definition of a theatre space.

In part, Electric Company evolved out of Studio 58’s teaching methods, which were established by its founder, Canadian theatre legend Antony Holland. Holland passed away at the age of 95 earlier this year, on July 29, so the 50th-anniversary hallmark is bittersweet. But it’s also a chance to marvel at what Holland had the foresight to build five decades ago, as well as the ways Shaw has developed the program since she took over as artistic director in 1985.

“Something we do that the other theatre schools don’t, and it’s been a philosophy from the day Antony started, is the students do everything,” Shaw says. “The students work backstage. For three terms they’re crew members backstage, they’re learning everything back there: set, props, publicity, sound, lights, and costumes. They understand the backstage and what goes into creating something. It’s allowing them to then go out and start theatres, because they understand what they have to do to get it up and running.”

Students also learn to market themselves, and to write grant proposals so that they can find the money to do their own work.

“What I’m trying to do at this point is make the students as employable as possible,” Shaw says. “To get the idea that they can create their own work in film or TV, that they can work on-stage. They can be interpreters and original creators.”

Kevin Loring is both an interpreter and a creator, and is one of the program’s great success stories. Growing up, Loring was always writing poetry and prose, but when he discovered playwright Tomson Highway, it was life-changing.

“It was the first time I’d ever encountered that kind of aboriginal narrative,” says Loring, speaking by phone from his Vancouver home. Loring, who is a member of the Lytton First Nation, was hooked. During his first year at Studio 58, he wrote a short solo show that would, nine years later, become Where the Blood Mixes, his 2009 Governor General’s Award–winning play.

With his company, Savage Society, Loring is hoping to produce more tours and bring the play back to Vancouver stages, but he’s also just finished one of his most ambitious projects ever, set in his hometown, about domestic violence and abuse of power.

“We had 30 community members in the play and we created eight original songs, with arias and laments and full-group songs,” Loring says. “It was almost like a native opera. We worked on it all of August and we performed it once. But now we have a totally built show and we’re going to try to tour it to the small towns in the Interior.”

Loring says Studio 58 gives its grads the tools to let their imaginations flow.

“Studio is three-and-a-half years of life-changing moments,” Loring says. “By the time you graduate, you can pull a show out of a cardboard box. They push you to your edges and get you to discover who you really are. If you’re a brilliant artist already, but a little rough around the edges, they help polish that out. Your core training at Studio is so strong, it just breeds these artistic leaders.”

“It’s part of our mandate to get people to know who they are, tell their own stories, and be contributing members of society at large,” Shaw says. “They’re good people, that’s the great thing about the graduates of Studio 58. They grow so much as people. That’s what keeps me here. Seeing where they start in the first term and where they end up two or three years later, then to see where they go five or 10 years later, it’s all so incredibly rewarding.”

Romeo + Juliet runs from Thursday (October 1) to October 18 at Langara College’s Studio 58.