One of the most challenging things about an actor approaching a script is that by time they finish working on it, they’re going to be living inside a role with a really unique perspective about that story. But in order to do that well, they have to start from a much more zoomed-out place.

That moment when you first read the text, you can never get back. And so it’s really important that when you first read it, as you move along, you take notes about the things you expect to happen, the things that surprise you, the way you think the relationships are happening inside the script, where you think the story is going. That is the journey your audience will take when they eventually come see the production or the film or watch the TV show. And there’s no way to recapture that experience when you already know how it ends.

Once you’ve gotten that initial, raw response to the text from an audience’s perspective, then you can begin to explore the text in a few different ways. In the performing arts, it’s important that actors go on a journey of curiosity to explore the things they don’t understand about the world that the text inhabits.

Maybe it’s about specific places that they don’t know anything about. Maybe it’s about the job that the character has. Maybe it’s about the nature of the relationship between the character and other people. No script is without a huge number of things to get curious about and dig into as a part of the research process in your online performing arts education.

There are classic ways of thinking about performing arts genres. For example, there are dramas and comedies and musicals. Talking about genres isn’t the same as talking about tones of theater. Even still, we can say that the tone is dramatic or comedic and that there’s musical theater and so forth.

To me, that becomes both interesting and complicated because much work in the contemporary moment actually jumps through those styles and those tones in really exciting ways. For me, the barrier building that comes with classifying genres and tones is not very helpful in online performing arts education. My personal interest lies in disrupting all of that.

Let me give you a little personal context about myself. I grew up in northern Mexico along the border with the US. The city where I’m from, Ciudad Juarez, is right on the border of an American city called El Paso, Texas. I grew up crossing the border between those two cities every day. That is how that community worked. My experience was both 100% Mexican and 100% American. It involved interacting with those communities and bringing the best of them to create and support my community.

For me, the idea of crossing borders is ingrained in who I am. As a theater maker, the minute that I’m given these kinds of binaries and I’m told, “This is this and that is that,” my immediate question is, “What happens when you begin to cross that border and begin to actually create a third space?”

I hear the ideas of playwright-driven work and collaborative work and classical work. I hear of proscenium in the theater work and site-specific work and immersive work. And when I do, I start to think of ways that we can begin to blur all that together and create another space that’s dynamic.

So for me, getting a handle on genres is an important and interesting part of performing arts education, but only inasmuch as it allows you to begin to blur the lines and acknowledge what’s inherited.

What are the inheritances that we have from our really old theater tradition? Those traditions stem from as early as the human creature delving into imagination and ritual. I like to cause trouble when it comes to that.

Even still, it’s important to understand where a work comes from so that it’s legible. You need to understand where the traditions come from. Again, to me, getting wonderfully lost in that is a really cool thing and a really exciting thing.

First, you write a play. If you’ve been invited or commissioned, then you have a place to submit it. If that isn’t the case, you have to figure out how to get your story put out in the world and entice industry professionals to read it. You have to know the market. It’s important to be aware of the kind of play that different theaters and directors are looking for. You can acquire this valuable insight from a performing arts education.

Then, after writing your play, you can submit it to theaters or directly to literary managers, if you know them, where they read scripts to artistic directors. If you have a director you prefer working with, you can submit the play to that person who might then pitch it to a theater.

These are some of the more effective ways of sending your work out for consideration. The National New Play Exchange allows playwrights to post scripts and describe them. This program attempts to reverse the traditional submission method. So, a theater might find your play on the National New Play Exchange and approach you instead of you trying to contact them.

I am often asked how to get a play produced. It’s not like sitting in a factory assembly line where you’re doing the same thing each time. Each script submission is always different, as an online performing arts education will teach you.

If you’re curious about how to get your play produced in Hollywood, off Broadway, or on Broadway, one thing is critical: it has to be good, and it must be enjoyable. Performing arts professionals have to like it and want to produce it. I discovered this when I asked Jay O. Sanders, who’s a well-known actor, to direct my play. Not only is he a friend, and I love his work, but I also knew his name recognition was going to bring Chris Noth into the mix, and then Barry, and then my investor to bring my story to life.

You’ve got to have a good product. You need to have a good story. You must have a good screenplay. But you then have to put together a team that’s compelling and committed. A little trickery, if you will, doesn’t hurt. When I called Chris Noth, I said, “Jay’s pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And when I called Jay, I said, “Chris is pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And as soon as I said Jay was in, Chris said, “Oh, well, if Jay does it, I will.” Then, Jay said, “Oh, I’ll do it. So Chris is in; that’s great.” The simple thing they had to do was to be a presenter. Teamwork in the performing arts can help a playwright to achieve that otherwise-elusive success.

Gianni Downs tells us that if you’re working in New York, almost every house is a union house. That means there are specific people who are trained and paid to do certain jobs. So, for instance, as a designer working on a Broadway show, you aren’t supposed to touch certain things on stage because there’s someone else who is employed to do so and knows how to do it safely.

Because of this, you want to be very conscious of what you’re doing in any house with which you’re unfamiliar. You want to make sure that you talk to your production manager, and also talk to the union heads who might be there with you. You need to find out what you’re allowed to do and which things require that you ask permission before you proceed.

These things are also true across the country. Yes, New York has many union houses, but most of the other major cities do as well. And those unions also might control different aspects. So, for example, you might work in a scene shop that isn’t union, and you might load a set right to the doors of a theater. Then, the union crew will take it and load it the rest of the way from there. That’s because the actual theater itself is a union house. Your scene shop, however, is not union. This type of thing is a pretty common experience for people who are doing shows and traveling from space to space.

Perhaps you’re in some sort of tour or you have a small professional theater, and you’re renting other houses to do your productions. “You can also be unionized in your shops themselves,” says Downs, “and these are people who have been trained and have joined the union, whether it’s IATSE, or in my case, I’m a USA 829 member.” This will not only dictate what you’re able to do professionally, but it will also help when you’re negotiating your contracts. As a union member, you’ll have certain guarantees within your contracts that will help you negotiate with potential producers and employers.

You can learn more about these concepts with performing arts education, or even learn from home with online performing arts education.

Openly experimental plays are the pieces of performing arts that will try to say, “we’re breaking down forms” when they invite the audience into a space. We’re really putting things together differently. Be prepared for the adventure of an environmental movement of immersive theater.

These are examples of things that changed the relationship between the actor and the audience. You are much more directly involved and implicated. You’re not simply sort of sitting in a red tufted seat and behaving yourself and clapping when appropriate.

One of the preeminent examples at this moment is a remarkable piece called Sleep No More by an incredible company from England called Punchdrunk. This is a really remarkable exploration of a Shakespearean play and the source material within it. The audience actually walks into this incredible, abandoned hotel, which is a warehouse. You travel through it. You are really experiencing this in a truly immersive way.

There are many other remarkable companies, like Third Rail Projects, that are exploring this in really exciting ways. Again, location becomes really interesting. Now that is not all the kinds of theater there are in terms of genres, but it is a way to understand contemporary theater when studying performing arts education or online performing arts education.

A former student of mine just did this show. They worked with a guy named Dave LAST NAME? Malloy? who is a book writer and lyricist. It was an a cappella show called “Octet.” It had eight singers who would start singing in harmony on a dime. They all had earpieces because he figured out a way to give them their notes remotely and even do a countdown so that they knew when to come in on time.

From the audience seating, you’re watching this show and wondering how they do it. Since I knew him, I wrote him and said, “How did you put this together?” He told me that it really took a while to figure out, but that it’s magic by the end.

Tech Solution Considerations

There are these technical things you need to take into consideration during your studies and career. As my former student explained, you might need to stretch something out, or show that the actors entered from the house. You might need to show that the way the audience came in is how the actors came in. You realize you’re going to need light in one spot and all of this drumming. You realize that you need to bring all of these elements together.

You need to figure out how much time it’s going to take them to all come through the house, up the stairs and come onto the stage. You need to determine what happens next and the cutoff. At that cutoff, you need to decide when the lights are going to hit and when the stage manager is going to call for the next lighting cue, which might be a blackout or a quick or slow transition.

All of these technical elements take time to prepare. A lot of them are decided and prepared during rehearsals, but they only really happen during the technical phase of preparation for a production. During that phase, everybody gets into the theater for the first time together. It’s that period when things start to change to make certain that everything happens in time: Members of the crew hang and focus the lights. It’s the first time that you’re on the stage with the lights. It’s the first time you’re on the stage with the costumes under the lights, which is an experience that the actors have to get used to before opening night.

Performing Arts Education

Your online performing arts education can give you a solid tech solutions foundation. It won’t only provide you with a history and evolution of technical solutions in theater and performing arts. It will also prepare you, depending on your career track, with knowledge and skills that you need to provide these and additional tech solutions to others working on a particular production.

When it comes to the performing arts, I start with this question: where is the audience? No matter how different the shows are — and some of them are on the streets, some of them are in museums, some of them are in theatres — what they actually have in common is that they all deeply focus on the relationship with the audience. That’s where we get to interactive theater.

Interactive theater is a type of theater where the shows interact directly with the audience. I emphasize ‘directly’ because, actually, theater always interacts with the audience. You can’t have theater without the audience, so even when you’re in a super-traditional space and you have the fourth wall, like you may learn about in performing arts education, you may think that there is no interaction. In actuality, there is; the actors, live on stage, respond to the energy from the audience members. That’s not something you can always see with an online performing arts education, but there are examples.

If all the spectators suddenly go to the bathroom, besides creating huge lines, the show would stop. If everybody laughs, that creates a type of energy in the theater. Essentially, even if we think that we’re doing a run of the same show, the show itself is never the same: the audience is changing it. The audience kind of becomes a co-creator of the show because part of the show is how they perceive it, how they imagine it, how they do the other half or quarter of the show. It really depends on how much you allow them to contribute.

Because of that, a lot of my shows put a huge emphasis on giving audience members an opportunity to be aware of their power, to be aware of their important, essential place.

The first thing you want to think about after you figure out for whom you are making a performing arts production is the quality of articulation of the story that’s being told. If you’re dealing with a script, and it’s written in vernacular, everyday language, is it as strong as it could be? Do you believe that the writer has a singular voice and talent that is ready for and deserves to be nurtured by full production?

Sometimes producer Elizabeth Bradley thinks that some of the most promising early playwrights are lost because they’re simply produced as needed and not produced as ready. Another problem that can occur is that they’d be much better writers if they were produced more frequently, earlier on, because, like everything else, it’s a craft. You get better at it, but where a particular writer will fall on that spectrum comes down to the play, the writer, and the piece.

In performing arts education or online performing arts education, you’ll learn to explore all of these essential questions. Do you have the right match of director? Does the director actually have a sense of conviction of what the sensibility of the piece needs? Can they partner with the writer? If they’re doing a revival of a classic play and they’re completely reinventing something, is the reinventing trenchant? Is it necessary?

When Malini Singh McDonald did Black Henna, for the first show they did a reading, and then they knew they were going to do a full production. They knew the first step would be to think about how much money this was going to cost. That’s always the first step in performing arts. How much money is this going to cost?

It’s so important to think it through, and luckily there are budgets that you can find in online performing arts education to give you an idea of how much each area is going to cost, more or less. Areas to consider are your space, your rehearsal space, because those are two separate things unless you can get a package, PR, music, and licensing.

In McDonald’s experience, they kind of had a budget but then forgot some line items like insurance. They begged, borrowed, and stole before coming up with their current style of finding investors. They just reached out to people and said, “Hey, we need X amount of dollars to get us to this point.” Thankfully, people loved them, and they loved people, so a lot of people were able to just give them the money.

Having learned from this experience though, they ended up in future productions really getting clear about the budget and then thinking about how they’re going to actually fund it. Not to say they don’t beg and borrow anymore. There are times they need to ask for more money because something comes up. One thing to learn in performing arts education is to always expect the unexpected.

For example, let’s say you budgeted $2,500 for this line item, and then it turns out to be $4,000 just because stuff happens. Plan ahead, stick to your budget, but budget for the unexpected.

The core of theater, going back to the Greeks, was to actually see yourself represented on stage. W.E.B. Du Bois said that Black theater should be theater that is written by us, by African-Americans, to be representative for us and to be shown near us.

Now’s the time to create a new representation of Blackness, a new look, and a new authentic appearance in the performing arts.

Performing arts education can help people understand Black theater history better by explaining why some performers did the types of shows they did.

Let’s go back to this idea of seeing yourself appearing on stage. If you were to read an issue of “The Crisis,” which was a magazine that was published by W.E.B. Du Bois, you would encounter stories of authentic Black life. Those stories would be presented on stage eventually, and not just by families by the fireside.

Slowly, over time, across the 1920s to the 1950s and so on, an Americanized version of theater emerged. We tend to imagine and pretend that Black theater came along in the 1960s, and that’s not true. Online performing arts education will hopefully start to dispel this false idea.

We had people in the 19th century like Bert Williams, who began as a blackface performer. He partnered with his friend, George Walker, and they went on stage with one in blackface and one not. They traveled across the vaudeville circuit and performed this way.

George Walker was the straight man to Bert Williams’ more comedic, stereotypical character. With the pairing of those two, they began to strip away the artifice and the mask that was blackface.

By the 20th century, the most heavily laden aspects of the blackface stereotype had gone away. You could begin to see the kind of comedy that was beneath it. That’s what Bert Williams did. He was the most popular performer in all of US theater, certainly in the first decade of the 1900s.

We had other actors who emerged, as well, like Charles Gilpin. Gilpin’s claim to fame was “The Emperor Jones,” which was a play by Eugene O’Neill. Charles Gilpin played the proud, confident character of Brutus Jones, a Chicago-born Pullman porter.

In the play, Jones moves to Haiti and becomes an emperor under somewhat corrupt circumstances. Later, he finds himself haunted and possessed by the spirits of the island.

That play was a Broadway hit for Gilpin, making him a star. George Walker also became a tremendously successful and well-known figure until he was replaced by a young up-and-coming actor by the name of Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson started performing a national tour of the “The Emperor Jones.” Because of that, it seemed like his career catapulted. He did the film version of “The Emperor Jones” and went on to star in a number of other films. He went back and forth between the concert hall as a singer and Broadway as a performer. And he was there when the LA entertainment culture emerged.