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The actor unsheathes his knife and slices deep into the fat belly lying prone before him. Then again. And again.

The blade is not a dulled prop, though the actor has wielded plenty of those when performing in plays like The Mikado and Man of La Mancha at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

The belly is not that of a fallen victim in a choreographed duel, but rather a freshly slaughtered pig.

And the man barking orders at him – to cut smaller pieces, to more precisely balance the ideal meat-to-fat ratio – is not a demanding director, but his father.

Juan Chioran and his father, Bruno, 87, have been making charcuterie together since Juan was a boy. This year, they work at Juan’s Stratford home as the actor prepares for stage roles. (Photos by Glenn Lowson for The Globe and Mail)

Today is not about acting for Juan Chioran. That will come in a matter of days, when Hamlet opens at the Stratford Festival Theatre, just around the corner from his house.

Today is about making sausage with “Papi.”

Papi is 87-year-old Bruno Chioran, who relocated his butchery wares to his son’s Stratford home last summer after faltering health forced him and his wife, Alba, to move from their beloved Toronto home into an apartment.

The old man’s fingers are themselves like sausages, plump and encased in semitransparent skin, their grip still vise-like after a lifetime as a mechanic, handyman and meat maestro. He is built of solid stock but his parts are failing; he walks with a cane and there’s a gash along his hairline, still moist with blood, from a fall earlier this morning.

After cutiting the meat and fat into small squares, the meat goes through an eight millimetre grinder.

Father and son are making sausages together because they always have – and because, before too long, they won’t be able to.

“These are living arts that tend to die if not passed down through the generations,” Juan says. “My grandfather went town to town butchering pigs. He passed that knowledge on to my dad, and he’s passing it on to me.”

Though Juan, 51, has no children of his own, he often invites friends to join these butchering bees, hoping they will help keep the traditions alive.

Father and son settle into a quiet routine at the butcher’s table on Juan’s sunlit porch, slicing their way through 13 kilograms of pork belly and shoulder, and slowly feeding it into the grinder Bruno acquired shortly after the family moved to Canada from Argentina in 1975.

The sausage is perforated before being sectioned off.

Bruno speaks only a dash of English, so the sporadic bursts of rapid-fire conversation – Where’s the garlic? Is that the wine we brought? – that punctuate the silent productivity is spoken in the family’s braided patois of Italian, Spanish, and the Paduan and Veneto dialects.

Juan’s parents love to see him perform but Shakespearean dialogue is beyond their comprehension. They much prefer his work in musicals (particularly when he portrayed former Argentine president Juan Peron in Stratford’s 2010 production of Evita).

As they butcher, Bruno implores his son to act as interpreter: “My dad says he enjoys sharing his knowledge,” translates Juan. “He would like me to carry these techniques forward.”

Like many Argentine Italians, the Chiorans were steeped in Old World culinary tradition, and remained so after they fled for Canada amid Argentina’s Dirty War (or Process of National Reorganization).

Juan Chioran hangs the finished sausage in his basement.

Those traditions now scent the air of the two-storey Stratford home. Papi eyeball-measures the sausage seasoning and sprinkles it by hand onto the mountain of ground meat. Mama’s in the kitchen, stirring a pot of velvety bean soup flavoured with cotechino sausage.

In the basement, an array of charcuterie – salami, capicollo, pancetta – hang pendulously from wooden racks in a small room just beyond the furnace, air-curing. In an industrial food plant, such a room would be precisely climate-controlled; here, Juan spritzes a hanging towel with water whenever a small hydrometer on the shelf reads below 70 per cent humidity.

“This is a real art,” he says.

It seems an unlikely art, though, for a classically trained actor who will soon tread the boards as the Player King in Hamlet and Don Adriano de Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, which opens in August.

“That’s the dichotomy. But I find cooking a very creative process. You are making from raw material something very different. That’s not so dissimilar to acting – taking raw words on a page and transforming them into a living, breathing story.”

Juan Chioran hangs the finished sausage in his basement.

He says this while untangling hog intestines, long as jump ropes and spaghetti-thin, in preparation for encasing the meat – all under the watchful eye of his Papi.

The finished sausages will surely be sumptuous and will feed many of the fellow actors who frequently nosh at the house, but all that is somewhat secondary.

What matters most is working with Papi, learning from him, while he still can, to ensure love’s labours are not lost.