The Dramatists Guild is a wonderful organization that supports playwrights all around the world and protects their rights. I would suggest joining the Dramatists Guild to anyone seriously trying to work in playwriting. Anyone in performing arts education can join it.

It wasn’t always like this. Playwrights didn’t always have such protections. Arthur Miller used to tell a story about how he went to the offices of a Broadway producer, and the producer had all of these books on his shelf that he had co-authored. Miller said to the producer, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a writer, too.”

The producer said, “Oh, I’m not. I just buy the copyright from these authors, and then I put my name on it as co-author.”

Thanks to changes in copyright law, that doesn’t happen anymore. And thanks to the Dramatists Guild, there is enforcement around these kinds of things.

When you write a play, a theater or a producer can license it from you, but they don’t buy it outright. They don’t own it. They can’t make themselves the co-author. They are paying you for the use of your work. You still own the copyright.

The Dramatists Guild has what they call the Dramatists Guild Bill of Rights. It says that the playwright has the right to be involved. It also asserts that unauthorized changes cannot be made to a script without the playwright’s permission.

A lot of people in online performing arts education don’t know that. They may have grown up with drama teachers doing cuttings of things. The teacher might take out a word or a scene that’s inappropriate for young people, and they think that’s totally legitimate. It really isn’t, and playwrights are allowed to — and have — shut down productions that have deviated from the script and made changes that nobody asked their permission for.

Sometimes the changes are really big, like changing the gender of a character. Other times, it’s just a word, and sometimes the playwright doesn’t care as much or finds out about it later.

But, in general, if you’re putting on a play, it is in your absolute best interest to check with the playwright before you make any change, no matter how small. Otherwise, the writer does have the right to shut down your play. Also, of course, you should always begin by getting permission to do the play.

A lot of people in performing arts don’t know that, and a lot of places have been shut down.

Many times, acting from an objective, external perspective seems simply like role pretending or mimicking other people. It’s easy to focus on the distance between you and the role. But in truth, being an actor is really about finding a way to reveal yourself through a given role in a screen or stage production.

For too long, acting meant one thing, or the kinds of acting, the kinds of stories, that were being told were only one kind of story. It’s vitally important at this moment, and it’s late in coming, that we find ourselves really encouraging newcomers to find their voice as an actor in the performing arts. It’s important to understand the way your own experiences, your unique point of view, and your individual identity offer something to your playing a role. It isn’t about you ignoring who you are or your story but bringing your perspective and experiences to the part. A quality performing arts education can help you to appreciate the challenges and opportunities of putting yourself into each role.

Your work is important and valued if you bring yourself fully to it and are given permission to do that. The more you are enabled to bring yourself to a role, the more your voice as an actor will be understood and heard. Nothing could be better for the profession or for you as an artist.

For too long, the stories that have been told in the theater, in TV, and in film have been the stories of white Europeans and particularly white European men. Those were the writers whose stories were produced. Here in the United States, it was white people and white men whose stories and plays were told and who were hired for the acting jobs.

Currently, we’re at an important moment of transition where Black artists, persons of color, and indigenous artists are finally, after far too long, being recognized as the vital storytellers they have always been. It’s important to them, as we encourage greater inclusion and people to bring their own identities into their work, that we recognize a unique voice is part of what needs to be valued in the performing arts process. It’s not enough to bring diverse voices into a room. Those voices have to be valued and their stories need to be told. Coming along with that can’t be a request for someone to set aside personal experiences or an untraditional point of view in order to transform into something else.

As you explore your work as an actor, what’s really important is that you give yourself permission to look at a role. Even when you see distance from it, recognize and really believe that your experience, your identity, your point of view, and your history are vital for the way you are going to be able to tell the story in a unique and meaningful way. You can study this process further by pursuing an online performing arts education. Learning all you can about inclusion and diversity in the performing arts will prepare you to make your mark in the industry.

If you’re interested in performing arts education, you need to learn the business side of it all. Take the business courses along with your regular online performing arts education courses. If you don’t want to deal with a spreadsheet or with numbers, consult an accountant or talk to an attorney. A lot of CPAs and attorneys — especially entertainment attorneys — have free panel discussions or some other networking event that you can attend and just sit and listen. Take notes because a lot of the business is just knowing the stuff you really don’t want to know about.

For example, you might not have space in your head to learn business law. I’m not saying to go be a lawyer, but I am saying that as artists, we’re already open. We’re creating. We’re taking the truth and putting it on a higher scale. The work that we are creating is elevated, wherever we’re creating it.

By opening night of a performing arts piece, the producer’s job is still not done. Instead of thinking about closing night, you’re now thinking about how to make sure that the run is productive and that you’re able to get people to come see the show. That’s where the second and third phases of marketing will come into play. You’re now thinking about how to fill these seats.

You should always aim to try to get the first two shows sold out because a sold-out show is a great marketing plan. That is the first and foremost goal you should learn as a producer in performing arts education or online performing arts education.

Producer Malini Singh McDonald has worked on a few shows like that. Once those first two shows are sold out, they were able to then shift to marketing and use some other posters that had been included in the marketing plan. On that note, it may be a good idea to have a few different posters that you can use at different times, so it’s not just one graphic. They use that in addition to seat fillers. There’s a lot of programs out there that you can use to help fill seats.

What does a scenic designer do? “Well, I am essentially in charge of all of the visual elements that you see in the theater,” says Giannis Downs. “That can be what the curtains look like, what the props look like, what the architecture is painted like, and even how the actors come in and out of the space. My work tends to influence the costume designer and the lighting designer as well.”

Often, the performing arts scenic designer is brought in earlier than some of the other designers because the number of architectural elements involved tend to require more time to work on. I often work about six to eight months in advance of a production. So the scenic designer will be contacted by a director or a producer early on. When hired, they will start meeting with the directors. Sometimes, they will be in different parts of the country and have video chats or phone conversations. They’ll get to know each other and do some visual research. Then, they’ll start to develop visual clues as to what the design might look like.

As we develop the design a little more, the scenic designer will start doing some renderings, which could be pencil sketches, which a performing arts education would recommend. But nowadays, they’re more often crafted as digital illustrations. That will help the production team determine what the overall look will be. As that develops further, scenic designers make 3-D models and photograph them to forward to the others. Sometimes, the scenic designer sends the model itself to the director for approval.

“We’ll then take that model and do draftings of each element that will appear in the show,” says Downs. “So that could be large walls, as well as architectural details and individual props.” Online performing arts education models can be helpful at this stage. The scenic designer will create a large package of draftings of everything that they can think of along with lists and references for all of the elements that will be involved.

The next step is to take the model and paint it in Photoshop or other digital programs, and that will provide color notes for the director to choose from. The lighting designer and costume designer can also base their ideas on these renderings. Those will become the basis for the painters to colorize the show. When the production team is actually in the theater, much of the scenic designer’s work is done.

With Module 5, “Managing the House and Beyond,” we’re going to take a look at the much larger ecosystem of people and professions that are involved in making live performances happen.

The performing arts experience for most of us involves simply showing up, receiving a program and watching a live performance. Yet, the reality of the performance involves so much more than the audience experience. There is an entire community, an ecosystem, and a long history of people from any number of different fields, including artistic, managerial and critical, that all come together to produce more than just the play or performance that you see on any given night. These people are in a conversation about live performance with a full, rich history throughout time and all over the world.

Performing Arts Education

As you can guess, we’re excited to share with you a tiny bit of insight into the many, many different kinds of professions that make up this exciting world of live performance. An online performing arts education can open doors you never might have imagined to a wide range of careers in dance, drama, music and various other performance-related fields.

Why join or not join a union? If you join a union, whether it’s Equity or SAG-AFTRA, you are guaranteed a certain amount of money per week. You have rights as an actor, and actors always need to look for places where they have rights because we are easily preyed upon. I don’t just mean things related to the MeToo movement. It can even be something like a director deciding to keep the actors past the allotted eight hours.

We need to work on actors’ knowledge of this during online performing arts education. For example, when you’re told to stay late, you can say, “I’m in Equity, I’m out,” and no harm should come to you. The same goes for SAG-AFTRA members.

When you’re in a union, the pay scale is different, and you have rights. You can be called to set, but you need a 12-hour turnaround time. They have to give you 12 hours from the time you get the call to the time you have to show up. That’s not always the case if you work non-union.

In a union, you have the possibility of health benefits if you work a certain amount. Also, the union automatically has a retirement fund for you.

On the other hand, anyone in performing arts education should also be aware of the disadvantages of being in a union. You can’t do non-union work if you are in a union. In markets like LA and New York, that’s less of an issue because there’s a lot of union work in those places. In off markets, it could be more of a problem.

For example, I came across this in Seattle quite often because I was in AFTRA. There were things that I could not do. There was a fair amount of performing arts work there that I just couldn’t take because I was in the union, and I wasn’t willing to give up that status for it. I was not willing to work non-union and change my face and name just to get work. That’s crossing lines, and I don’t believe in that. I think unions are an amazing thing.

The question about whether or not you should join is a very personal one. If you are comfortable doing work that is non-union, and you are working a fair amount or fairly often, then there’s no need for you to join. If you want to get into a larger market and do the bigger work, then you should join the union.

I think that would be my advice. Also, if you’re in, you can decide to defer or leave and then do non-union work, but it’s a bit of a steep thing to get into. Not everybody is very interested or curious about trying to get out of it.

When studying performing arts education or online performing arts education, it’s important to study the patterns and the history of how modern theater came to be and how it was influenced by its predecessors.

Back in 1925, W.E.B. Du Bois created his own performing arts script theater company called the Krigwa Players. What that theater company did was propose the idea that the African-American community needed to create new works. They couldn’t rely upon any sort of theater that existed from the previous century because it was all stereotypical.

The creation of a new Blacks dramaturgy was championed with the emergence of new playwrights. Before the theater came along Angelina Weld Grimke began to write the play “Rachel,” which was a lynching play. You also began to see the early mentorship of people such as Langston Hughes, who came along and became much more of a force by the late 1930s and early 1940s.

You have non-black artists like George Gershwin, who loved opera and was inspired by Black African-American culture. He wanted to do something there. He came along and he created Porgy and Bess. It became a classic, grand, comical opera.

By the time you get into the 1930s, you have the emergence of a dynamic and more authentic African-American experience. Then what occurred during the Great Depression was the Federal Theater Project in which the government pumped money into different industries to give people a chance. They wanted to give people an opportunity to earn an honest dollar.

As part of that, artists were employed. There was a Black unit of the Federal Theater Project. It’s through that when you begin to get a number of theater companies that popped up here and there, supported by the government. There was a generation of professional Black actors who were given a chance because of support by local governments and by the federal government at large.

That propelled the future of American theater. You can almost say that every 20 years a generation passes the torch to the next generation. It’s the Negro theater unit of the Federal Theater Project that then passed the torch to those who then were the youngsters in the 1960s. This influenced people like Amiri Baraka and Lorraine Hansberry.

“A dancer is expected to embody the vision of dance,” says Jeff Kaplan. “They’re expected to take movement so they are the personification of that art on stage. Particularly in modern dance, choreographers tend to see themselves as facilitators, so they might take a group of dancers and say, ‘OK, I’d like you to journal a little. And then from what you write, we’re going to take out moments, next we’re going to take up verbs, we’re going to take out nouns, and lastly, we’re going to turn them into shapes. Now, you go over there and create eight accounts and we’re going to look at it and glue it together.”

He goes on to explain that in the ballet world it’s still more traditional for the choreographer to tell the dancers what to do. The choreographer is in charge of creating the original work. This is even taught in online performing arts education.

So unlike other performing arts, like a play, you are creating what you perform. Unlike a symphony orchestra, where you get sheet music, the content doesn’t exist yet. So in dance, the day-to-day work happens in the studio. It happens collaboratively. And you’re working as a team to create and perform something new from the knowledge with performing arts education.

One thing covered in performing arts education is the different types of dance. So, what are some of the different genres of dance? For this type of thing, it helps to speak in very broad categories, just to let people know what ballpark you’re talking about. And perhaps the form of dance that most people might have heard of is ballet. Ballet emerged out of the courts of Europe, and it’s certainly strange to think of a modern-day president doing plies and tendus. But it did, in fact, start in the courts of France, as the nobles would dance with each other and spread gossip while they were dancing.

It was all about seeing and being seen, and it was also a form of exercise. It became codified in places like France, which was the cultural capital of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. But ballet is a very codified form of movement in which there are five possible positions of the feet—each of which has a name and both a correct and incorrect way of doing it. You learn those sequences, and you find that it favors a certain type of body. You need to have a certain rotation from the hips, and you have to have a certain type of flexibility, and your feet even need to point a certain way.

Another form of dance is jazz dance, which emerged in America corresponding with jazz music, although it has departed since then and is more presentational. Jazz dance is also more entertainment-focused. It lends itself very well to musical theater. It emerged, in many ways, as a synthesis of Afrocentric dance forms and African dance forms, as well as Irish sensibilities of rhythm and even a relationship with tap dance.

With jazz dance, you move parts of your body independently at different rhythms, and it’s also very much character-driven. There are names of steps with jazz dance, as well. There are famous choreographers and styles of jazz, ranging from very lyrical and resembling ballet, to others that seem much more urban.

As for hip hop dance and related forms such as krump, pop-locking, and others come out of the experience of youths in American cities, and that typically has a very strong relationship with popular music, culture, and fashion.

Another is modern dance, and it emerged out of trends in America, as well as Europe in places like Germany. Modern dance is very much a rejection of ballet, in which it asks why we only need five positions of the feet. It asks why we need to wear shoes, why we need to dance to music, or certain kinds of music. If you were to imagine that you were born on a desert island and nobody had ever taught you how to dance, how would you dance? It’s very much about finding the patterns and finding your own movement preferences. Modern dance also tends to be very much influenced by the choreographer—influenced by the way that they move, as well as the influences that they have.

So, those are a few of the more well-known dance genres, what they entail, and how they originated. You can learn much more about dance and other performing arts-related topics by exploring the world of online performing arts education.