Let’s talk about flooring and how it impacts a dance.

Let’s say you’re working in tap shoes. Tap shoes, as we all know, have metal on the bottom of each shoe, right? Well, if you’re tapping, then that surface you’re tapping on is important.

Is it tile?
Is it wood?
Is it cork?
Is it slippery?
Is it sticky?

You need to know the answers to these questions to provide the best performance possible.

Furniture can also double as flooring, which means you need to know how all of the onstage elements interact together. These elements are going to give you wonderful choices. If you said, “Oh, I’d like them to dance on that piece of furniture, or I’d like them to tap on that piece of furniture.” Well, you need to make sure that the particular piece of furniture is, first of all, going to allow you to do that instead of unsafe for a dancer to use and a fall or collapse risk.

Performing Arts Education

Your online performing arts education can help you better understand all of the elements of a stage, set or other performance area. It opens your eyes to what you need to take into account to make a performance a success. It can also teach you how to do a better job at protecting yourself and others from common accidents.

“Props are anything that an actor might touch or handle,” Gianni Downs says. “Sometimes you might refer to them as properties. And you can think of them in a couple of different ways.”

Hand props are props that actors will carry around with them. There are set props that may exist in a room, such as a furniture that an actor cannot move on their own. Then there are decorative props, such as curtains hanging on the wall or paintings that may be present. You can think of anything that isn’t built by the carpentry shop as a prop. These are frequently things that you might come across in your daily life.

Is the couch upholstered? What type of upholstery is it? Is it made of wood? Is it made of metal? These elements may tell the audience in a matter of seconds who the individual in a room is or what the play is about. This is considered to be performing arts.

When it comes to staging design, such small changes may significantly influence. And these are the kinds of judgments that a designer must make regularly.

And it is your responsibility to make those decisions. And your choices should be influenced by the program you’re working on as well as the characters that inhabit it. These skills can be acquired through online performing arts education.

Often, there will be a significant meal scene in many older programs. And this may be for a Christmas party or a particular function. A table scene can often serve as the focal point of an entire play.

One props designer told me that mashed potatoes are used in almost all her creations. As a result, she can shape it into a variety of different shapes. She can dye it in a variety of colors.

It’s also simple for people to consume. Furthermore, almost no one is allergic to it. So you’ll often see mounds of different things on a plate that people are eating. And it could be mashed potatoes.

Alcohol is another thing that is very common in the theater. So many shows revolve around people making poor choices. And those decisions are frequently made while under the influence of alcohol.

As a result, a large part of my job as a scene designer is to plan out where the furniture will be placed on the stage. The director and I will work closely together to determine where items will go, how they will be set, and what angle they will be.

Performing arts education helps in decision making. It’s a good idea to consider what kinds of chairs may exist in the environment you’re building. Are there any weapons? Is this a high-backed chair?

And if you’re going to drink on stage, you should drink something that looks like alcohol but won’t get the actor intoxicated. As a result, flat soda is frequently used. Food coloring and water can be used.

It may be fluids. I’ve heard of people using different teas to achieve different hues. And you can come across property designers who have recipe books for various types of booze, whether it’s brandy, whiskey, or something else. You can be seeking something, or the script might be asking for something.

One of the fundamental truths about the theater is that it’s about community. Even if you have a physical theater, it’s still about the community. My favorite theater is the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago at the Goodman, where I lived for 15 years. I live in Boston now, and soon there will be a new favorite Boston theater.

When you think about your favorite theater, you remember that it’s a place where the people would gather. That’s why it’s essential for theater companies and programs to engage in the local communities.

Theaters Canvassing Neighborhoods are Crucial for Performing Arts Programs

The primary responsibility of theater companies and programs is to link the physical theater buildings, spaces, and productions to multiple communities within a city. This is the key to a successful and thriving theater. You can’t just imagine a play, open the doors, and expect people to come. You have to engage with the local communities.

Even if the theater has subscribers, their goal and obligation is to impact the conversations within the society. Community education specialists and directors of community engagement will go out and build partnerships within local communities. Sometimes this includes productions where actors will go out and canvas local areas. They will go to places like schools and libraries to talk about the theater content and sociohistorical components of the production. They will discuss their own lives and stories to build connections with the people in the area. They are trying to convey that the community is not just for the actors; it’s for everyone. It’s everyone’s theater.

The fact is that the theater is always in need of new audiences. The theater building may be there for over 100 years, but it’s not enough to bring in the people by itself. The theater crew has to go out and do the work of bringing in audience members. Community specialists are responsible for going out and gathering the culturally aware people that create the evolving dynamic of theater audiences.

The benefit of this kind of canvassing work is that many people haven’t spent much time thinking about the theater, but they have studied it at some point. Remember those Shakespeare plays you had to read in high school. Now, you have an actual theater company talking about literature, language, self-expression, and the reality of transporting a person into the world of theater.

It doesn’t make a difference if you love Shakespeare or not. There is still an appreciation for his theater skills. Those skills of self-expression, telling a story concisely and passionately, and reading history through culture. These are the things that you want people to take with them when they leave the theater.

Theater Arts Bring Communities Together

There is a whole way of thinking with this kind of outreach. For example, interacting with the kids at school can quickly spread to other people that they know. The communication within the kids soon reaches their parents, grandparents, siblings, and neighbors. This sense of community is why this work is so important. Communities can be brought together through the arts.

When people think about the many different roles played in the theater, they often refer to only the actors on stage. They usually don’t think about the people who are out making the theater an active part of their lives. These are the people that work off-stage and behind the scenes.

These are the people that are working in offices somewhere. They talk with people in the neighborhood about what’s going on and the concerns surrounding those things.

The theater stage is also a great place to talk about social issues, including relationships and health issues. The theater is a way to acknowledge real problems that people can relate to. Every family is strained at some point in time. Those individuals who have to portray these issues in the theater can help make a difference in the real world.

All of these reasons and more are why the people who specialize in community engagement are so important. There is no one more active or integral in terms of a larger ripple effect of theater than these folks.

One thing that comes up a fair amount in performing arts is the feeling that I’m trying to communicate something with these words but I don’t understand how it works in my body. So, I really advocate for people thinking about acting through using action verbs.

It’s something that’s been around for a long time. In performing arts education, we often talk about actioning a script or using action verbs to talk about what you’re doing to another person. If you had a very simple text, like “I love you,” that you were saying to somebody, rather than simply loving them with that text, can you think of something more specific that you’re doing? Maybe you are adoring that person.

But I can also imagine a very interesting scene where someone says, “I love you,” but the action they’re playing is eviscerating. I’m interested in what that means. It’s exciting for an audience, too, when something about the action you’re playing and the text support each other but don’t necessarily simply duplicate each other. It produces a reason for the audience to lean forward to try to investigate what it is that they’re experiencing.

And while that might make perfectly logical sense in text, I think it’s, sometimes, harder for actors to understand. But that’s also true in their body. If I’m saying, “I love you,” but my action is eviscerating, that’s going to manifest in my body in some way. That way might be enormous. It might be very small. But it’s going to be present, especially if, as you explore a text even before you get into rehearsal, you’re thinking about those action verbs.

We know now that simply thinking about action verbs starts to spark some of the same parts of your brain that doing those action verbs would do.

“I was a great admirer of the novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” says Elizabeth Bradley. “And at one point, I thought it would be a great idea to teach a course on adaptation. And if I had ever done such a thing, and have not done so yet, I would probably have used that novel as an example of how impossible it actually is to translate the core ethos of a beautifully constructed novel to the stage.”

Well, how wrong could I possibly have been? Because watching Marianne Elliott’s adaptation of Curious Incident in the Nighttime, I sat there and thought, I mean, I’m ready to fall in love with the theater all over again. Because this kind of enlivened theatrical imagination, if you can do this, the theater can do anything. So just when you think, “no,” somebody comes along and says, “yes,” and brilliantly.

It was a different kind of challenge. Of course, that is written in letter form. I think it’s called an epistolary novel. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a letter to his son about the reality of living his life as a Black male in America and as a young Black male in America—an important concept in performing arts education.

And the way the adaptation was handled was through a rotating cast of readers, both men and women who tackled sections of the scored book. By scored, I mean the original music composition that was created to accompany the read prose text created another whole piece of emotional access leverage if you will. You felt like you were falling into the words via the music, in a way that you couldn’t really have done sitting at home reading it, no matter how profound that experience was. And I would argue that both have value in the performing arts.

American Theater has this odd attachment to its own mortality. In the 1940s, Arthur Miller was writing plays like All My Sons and Death of a Salesman in America. This was a prime time for American theater. These plays were taking charge across broadway. Arthur Miller made statements about how he wished the theater across the pond in the UK was happy like the theater in America.

Good Theater Never Dies

By the time you get to the 1930s and 1940s, you’re looking at the emergence of Odet’s plays, Arthur Miller’s plays, and Tennessee William’s plays. These were all very popular at the time and still today. Eugene O’Neill appeared twice in the 1910s and 1920s. He then came back after he died in posthumous performances like Long Day’s Journey.

Performing Arts is an Experience that Dates Back to the Early Greeks

What makes American theater great is the sense of sitting around, hearing the stories of your neighbors, all while actually sitting next to your neighbors. This concept goes back to the earliest moment of the Greeks. The most important and magical moment in theater is when you walk through the door. It’s the experience of what you are doing and what you are about to be doing. This represents tracing of the past to the present. It’s something that’s not unlike what the ancient Greeks encountered and experienced back then.

Theater Is a Community Experience

So you walk into this playing area, look around, and see your neighbors. You look on stage and notice familiar faces from the community. You hear stories of adventures that you are going on vicariously through these people. The drama transports you beyond the stage and arena into a world beyond the theater. Together, you are seeing life being portrayed.

When you’re analyzing a script, I think you might do well to sort of pick one of those characters and track all those tensions, and then pick two characters and understand how the conflict’s happening. Then pick the family and understand where the conflict’s happening. It’s a show full of a lot of conflict. Characters are in conflict with each other, inside the family and outside the family.

On top of it, the mother decides that she’s going to buy a house. She’s going to buy a house in a white neighborhood. So, everybody has to ask, “What does it mean to, sort of, grow?” But there’s a plant that’s struggling to live, struggling to live in the sun, struggling to live in the sun like a raisin in the sun. Is it going to be the raisin or is it going to grow?

It doesn’t have a lot of sustenance, but it’s got love. It’s got attention. It’s got what the family can give it. So, on some level that’s what the show is about. It’s also about the family to sort of come apart in certain ways, so that they can then come together again. That’s what I think the play is about, and that’s how, as an actor, that’s what I would suggest. If I was scoring it, if I was directing it, I would say, “OK, where do those tensions live? This incident that happens… what is being revealed, and what is being played with, and what is being exposed?” What opportunities do the characters have to transcend where they are, to think of new stuff, to take a chance and to think of something new?

That’s how I would analyze this script, that’s how I would see my way through this—through this artificial thing called a play that happens to be called “Raisin in the Sun.”

[In performing arts,] what human stuff can be brought out? That’s how I would approach the script analysis. I challenge you all to try to uncover that stuff for yourselves.

“Let’s talk about an agent in the performing arts field,” says Bret Shuford. “If you have an agent and you get an agent — and I will say this — it is much easier to get good work than it is to get a good agent. If your goal is to pursue getting an agent, let that one go. Go for the work. Because if you get good work, you’ll get an agent as a result. If you’re going for the work, that’s going to make getting an agent easy. That’s also going to help your agent. You’re going to build a stronger relationship with your agent because you have a great resume.”

When you’re with an agent, they will send you an appointment. Now it’s all done by email, but I do remember when it was done by phone. And when they send you an email, you want to communicate with them if that time slot works. They will give you a dedicated time slot for you to go in and audition. They will also send you a PDF with the files that you need to prepare. And your job is to prepare as much as possible up until the day that you go in. So that means working with a coach, hiring someone just for an hour to go over those sides, getting a vocal coach if it’s music. And you’ll need to learn that music.

“There are lots of ways to get auditions,” adds Philip Hernandez. “If you have an agent and a manager, then they will be on the hunt for things for you. The breakdowns will go to them, and then they will shuffle off anything they think is appropriate for you. They’ll send it your way. That’s one way.”

There are lots of other ways and lots of self-taping these days. You can go on Actors Access, for instance, and you can have an account there, a profile there. They have a profile for you so that people will be able to look you up. Then, if there are appropriate roles, then you’ll be able to be submitted for those. You’ll get a notification that says you have an audition. Then you do the self-tape, which you do at home, and then you send it in. They’ll give you the sides, the copy, all of that stuff.

Finding representation is one of the things you’ll learn when you get a performing arts education.

“Among the careers in performing arts management, of course, the closest to the building of the actual production would be the stage manager and the assistant stage manager because they will be with the director, the creative team, and the actors all the way from the first rehearsal to the dress rehearsal, the first preview and the closing night,” Elizabeth Bradley says. “They are, truly, in a sense, the hub of the wheel and the steward of the quality of that creativity once the show runs.”

“A stage manager is not only in the rehearsal process,” Mary Ann Kellogg adds. “They are responsible for scheduling the day, making sure everything runs smoothly, the director getting what they need, the actors getting what they require to do the job, and the dancers being warmed up. And all that has to be scheduled so that the stage manager goes from the very beginning to the end of the process with the director.”

The director and stage manager work together as they hold auditions, come up with a cast, and begin to break down the script, which they call being on-book and being off-book, a situation where you’re working with actors who are doing scenes and speaking dialogue.

The stage manager has to organize all those departments. So, if you have a singing lesson, if you have a costume fitting, or if you have a private coach, that needs to be scheduled. And the rehearsal day needs to be scheduled for which scenes and who’s in those scenes. Everyone needs to be told and scheduled before the day begins. Take this into account as you continue your performing arts education.

The role of the actor on the stage of performing arts varies from actor to actor, and everybody has their own methods. Everybody comes in with a different agenda. Everyone has their own background in performing arts education or online performing arts education. Everything is different, and it’s up to the director to pretty much funnel it all in.

Having been raised by a theater director, I was taught and I hold it as what my own beliefs are is that when I go to do a play, I’m there to realize the director’s vision of that play. I’m an interpreter, and as an actor I will interpret the role. And I will come in with what I think the character should do, and how the character should behave, how the character should walk, everything.

Then the director will have his or her very strong ideas about the character, and then the rehearsal process — that four weeks of going into a room with actors, and your director, and the designers — is just, for me, why I do it. It’s an actor’s playground. You get to fail in that space because you don’t have an audience. You get to stretch your instrument. You get to try many different things and explore the possibilities.

Then you’ve got this director with his ideas or her ideas coming at you, and then you have another actor coming at you with who they are. So, maybe a preconceived idea of how I was going to react to a character is different depending on who’s playing the character, and all of you in this room give birth to something nobody could have thought of on their own. And that’s what’s thrilling. That’s creativity. And I could literally not perform at all and just do the rehearsal and be a very happy actor.