By Joanne Ward-Jerrett

Call it good karma, serendipity, or plain old luck – but for Calgary resident Ophelia Stone, a sidewalk encounter with a former schoolmate dramatically changed her life course.

Discovering Dal

“We were talking about plans for after high school and my friend mentioned that he was going to Dal. I had pretty much decided on Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, so I just Googled Dalhousie out of idle curiosity,” she says. “I was checking out this really cool Fountain School of Performing Arts when I came upon the costume studies program. Until that moment, I had no idea that you could even study something like that or have a career in that.”

Thrilled at the prospect of embarking on a program with a tangible career path, Ophelia promptly applied for and was accepted into the costume studies program. Then, a few months later, she received word that she was to be the recipient of a renewable Fountain Scholarship valued at $16,000. By August, she had found herself a room to rent near Dal with a couple of “cool dudes” and she was on the road, heading for Halifax with her mom in the passenger seat. “Neither of us had ever been to the East Coast, but here we were on a cross-country adventure. And with the scholarship in hand, I was looking at a future that didn’t involve getting buried in debt.”

Stimulating her creativity

The first in her family to attend university, Ophelia grew up around the Calgary arts scene. “My mother is a make-up artist and we’ve always been involved in theatre,” she says. “When I was a kid, my favourite holiday was Halloween because I’d design my own costumes and then my grandmother would help me sew them together.”

Such experiences provided a good foundation for Ophelia’s first-year studies at Dal, which involved lots of costume-making, often after-hours. Her first major assignment was dressing the Quality Street production, which she thoroughly enjoyed. But her favorite production by far, she says, was Green Bird – an uproariously hilarious fairy tale directed by Margot Dionne as the season-closer of the Fountain School of Performing Arts 2015–16 season. “Those fourth-year students are really going somewhere,” says Ophelia. “I just know that someday they’ll be really famous and I’ll be able to say, ‘hey, I ironed that guy’s pants when he was a student!’”

New horizons

In summary, it has been a great year for Ophelia. In very short order, she has made loads of new friends and she has a new boyfriend, also a Dal student.

“Everyone I’ve met matters,” she says. “I love the theatre community here and I really like Halifax and living by the ocean.”

As to her future plans, Ophelia sees herself working in film, television, or maybe the Cirque du Soleil. “I’ll have to work my way up the ladder. But it would be really cool to work in film and to play such an important role in helping the actors get into character.”