Performing Arts Education: What Do You Have?

When starting a performing arts project from the very beginning, it’s important to understand exactly what kind of production you have. It’s very different to produce a piece that needs a very affluent audience, for example, than it is to produce a piece that would be perfectly happy downtown in one of these warehouses. An example might be when I first saw “Little Shop of Horrors” when it was done off Broadway, more like off off Broadway.

The paint was peeling on the walls, the springs were coming through the bald, frayed seats. You felt like you were taking your life in your hands to get down to that part of the East Village. When Audrey sang about somewhere that’s green, you really knew she needed to get somewhere that’s green. What that showed is that the producers of that piece, the creators of that piece, had a really solid understanding of the context that would serve that piece, especially at the beginning.

It often seems that when a young playwright has a first treatment of a script, or a young group of actors comes together and talks about wanting to create a piece of theater on a certain theme, that one member of the team might have one way of describing the theme, and the second, third, and fourth members might have something that was just a little bit different. My response is, “Are you sure you all want to make the same thing?” And again, it’s not about rigidity or making everything homogeneous, but it’s being able to answer that core specific question, “What is it? What is the thing that you want to make, and who do you want to make it for?”

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