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.

The publicizing part is actually mostly complete if you are very clear about why you’re producing your show in an elevator pitch and already talking about your vision, strategy and execution plans to people who can help you achieve your dreams and goals. It’s merely a matter of thinking outside the box to find the people who can help you.

Reaching the Right Audience

I didn’t go to school to become a publicist, which means that my training came through real-world, hands-on experiences. One of the greatest gifts that has come my way over the years was the knowledge about how to attract interest in shows. It really is all about who you know in this industry, especially in a time when it’s actually extremely difficult to get reviews.

Obstacles in Every Direction

It’s especially hard to get reviews in New York City. This region is oversaturated. It’s just hard. There are only a handful of reviewers. There are only a few places you can go to actually get what you need in order to make a press kit, which is why you really have to think outside the box.

In my case, I use every possible method I can think of to reach potential reviewers, including postal direct mailers, email lists and social media. I use all of to get the word out.

When using these methods, you need to answer in engaging ways common questions like:

– What is your show about?
– Is there something very unique about your show that would be of interest?

Believe you me, there is a blogger out there who’s interested in that one thing, whatever it is, that makes your show worth people’s time and money. You merely need to explore the possibilities.

Online Performing Arts Education

It’s funny. This morning, I was working on something similar to this discussion in relation to thinking about how we create content. We think that if we can just find the stories, then we’ll be able to get outlets interested in our content.

Publicizing is more than just writing a press release and sending it out to everyone even though you do need to have one. A press release just lets people know what’s going on and when it’s happening. What you need more is the follow up.

To attract that interest, you need to have a clear idea of why you want specific publications, media outlets, bloggers and others, to come see your show. This is where your performing arts education can help you. Your courses can give you the knowledge and tools to come up with these answers and attract interest in your shows.

“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.

In a theatrical context, one of the big things that you focus on is the band. You first ask yourself what the band is going to be and how many people will be in it. You often make that decision or at least start to formulate some possible answers before you ever speak to any orchestrator. Why? It all comes down to your production’s sound budget.

A Sound Budget’s Impact

While preparing a production, there will be issues because of the budget. Cost must be taken into account. We might say that we think we can afford four musicians or 14 musicians or 140 musicians, whatever the number that works for that production, but then we have to look at our budget before we go any further. The budget is essential to making a theatrical production work, after all. I must remind myself that I can’t be insensitive to those issues.

I have to look at that number and ask myself how do I make it work. Can I make that work? Do I feel I need to argue for more musicians?

Working Within a Budget

Somebody might say, for example, “You’ve got 12.” You might think: Okay. Well, we need to have this, that and the other to suit this style of music. Generally speaking, we have six, seven, or eight choices in say that kind of number, which are going to be absolutely essential.

If it’s a pop kind of score, you know you’re going to need drums, bass guitar, and people. These things are pretty obvious. You then think about what other band-related things you need. What other colors are you looking for within this production? What’s going to tell this story best?

You might then say to yourself: I really think I’m going to need to have 13 for this production, which means you must try to make a convincing argument to the GMs. Sometimes, it works. You get what you need. Sometimes, it doesn’t work, and then you have to find a way to make the score sound as good as it can within the confines of what’s available.

Performing Arts Education

One thing you learn more about through your online performing arts education is how the sound budget and other budgets impact a production. You also learn methods to help you try to make certain that a show will go on as planned even if a budget doesn’t support everything that would normally go into that particular production.

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.

In musical theater, your book is a three-ring binder that has all of the songs that you sing for auditions. In this book, you should have everything that you’ve worked and honed and now sing really well.

Your Book Can Reveal Your Vocal Range

You should have one song, for instance, that you present as three different cuts. You can have an eight-bar cut, a 16-bar cut and a 32-bar cut. You can also have a full song. Having these cuts already available makes certain that you’re prepared no matter what they want to hear.

A lot of times, you go to an audition and you’re told, “Well, we’re running behind schedule. We’re only going to have you sing eight bars,” or they only want to see you perform 16 bars. You need to construct those 16 bars so that they show you not only you as a person, but they also show your acting chops and vocal range. Each cut has to be tailored to the needs of the audition, which means that you should have three or four versions of every song in your book.

You should also have a representation of all of the styles that you do well in your book. For example, you might have a Golden Age song from “Oklahoma” or something from “Jesus Christ Superstar” like “Heaven on Their Minds.” You should have a wide spectrum of songs that you do really well.

Two Books Make Life Easier

Your book, you must realize, is also your accompanist, which is why I actually have two books. I have a book of stuff that I’m working on that’s just for me. It it has my audition material in it too. I also have a book marked up for the accompanist that has only audition material in it.

Anything I might want them to do, such as crescendo or slow down at certain places, is marked in musical notation in the audition version of my book so the accompanist can see it and play it the way I want them to play it.

I make certain that each page of the book is inside of non-glare sheet protectors as well because I don’t want the accompanist to struggle when they sit down in an audition room under harsh fluorescent lighting. I want to make their life as easy as possible because then I can make the most of my only opportunity for that particular audition to perform at my best.

Your Performing Arts Education

This is only an introduction to the actor’s book. You can learn more tips for creating, using and maintaining this critical tool in your online performing arts education courses. Your performing arts studies can provide all of the details you need to make certain that your career takes off quickly once your formal academic education is complete.

“The Bench (A Homeless Love Story)” is a piece that has been online performing arts education expert and playwright Robert Galinsky’s calling card for the past few years. Galinsky wrote the first draft when he was collaborating with August Wilson in 1986-87 in New Haven. At the time, he was also working with Lloyd Richards at Yale University’s performing arts education department.

The structure of “The Bench” evolved over time. “It really came down to discovering that there was one character, Joe, who was going through something, traveling a journey, and was potentially going to be changed or not changed,” Galinsky says. “And everybody else was serving that particular cause and that arc.”

At the same time, all of the other characters have something at stake with Joe’s journey. There is something at risk for everybody, and it will result in either a reward or a loss based on what he goes through.

Joe is in love with somebody, but he will not admit it. “It’s a real simple structure, but simplicity is great because now we can see how complex human beings are with their behaviors over such simple things,” comments Galinsky. “The guy can’t admit he loves this woman so he goes out and basically trashes her all the time.”

Joe’s behavior has an effect on everybody else in their little community; because of it, the townspeople do not all get along. They finally tell Joe to man up. “Go tell her you love her. It’s simple as that,” Galinsky says.

It’s “as simple as that” according to the townspeople, but for Joe, it’s not that simple. He lost love in his heart years ago and had been through many different things that destroyed his sense of hope. He didn’t know that he could find love again; in fact, he was afraid to find love again. Ultimately, four other vagabonds gave him the courage to face his fears and give love a shot.

Joe proceeds to go and profess his love to the woman. She rebuffs him and resists. Just like Joe, she is hardened and doesn’t want anything to do with love. It was too vulnerable, too soft of a place to be, and too scary. For her, it was easier to put the wall up and have a thick layer in front of everybody and everything in life.

Nonetheless, Joe persists in his confession, and the woman begins to see him in a different way. He comes to her in a different way from the past, and she relents a little bit. “She doesn’t give him the full on, yeah, I’m with you buddy, but she gives him a little window into the possibility that she might love him back, just a tiny window,” says Galinsky.

Joe has no guarantees; nor does he have promises. He knows, however, that there is a tomorrow. He will see her again, and life just might be different.

Generational change impacts not only society but also the performing arts that reflect and comment on it. This is an important point to keep in mind as you continue your online performing arts education. Harvey Young, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, and Elizabeth Bradley, Broadway theater critic and professor at New York University, share their thoughts on emerging African American playwrights and how they’re transforming the dynamic of the theater.

Harvey Young sees a passing of the torch from August Wilson, whose plays chronicled the 20th-century African American experience decade by decade, to notable Black playwrights giving voice to the African American experience today. “You see Suzan-Lori Parks, you see Lynn Nottage, receiving additional support and mentorship. You begin to see folks like Katori Hall emerging as well,” Young says.

“You can see every 20 years, there is this generational passing in which the lessons, the struggles as well, the histories, the life lessons go from generation, to generation, to generation,” he observes.

“If the job of art is to tell society what it can’t know without art, I think that the white American theater has stepped back far too long from that responsibility,” says Elizabeth Bradley.

She comments on the contributions of the new generation of Black voices: “The playwrights who have emerged in the last four to five years, whether they have been working quietly away and we just haven’t discovered them, or they are new voices such as Lynn Nottage, who has had a very long career. A more recent career is that of Jeremy O. Harris. Dominique Morisseau is another example of a very important African-American female writer.

“Of course, Suzan-Lori Parks has been heralded for decades now and is a Pulitzer prize winner. Katori Hall is another example. With plays like ‘Fairview,’ and plays from the African diaspora like ‘African Mean Girls’ or the ‘School Girls’ play, there has been a push forward. Tarell Alvin McCraney with ‘Choir Boy’ or Branden Jacobs Jenkins with ‘Everybody.'”

Bradley continues, “It has been manifest that there is a depth of talent on the musical side. For example, there’s Michael Jackson — not the one with the white glove, but the one who wrote the musical, ‘Strange Loop,’ which is the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner. “These voices are coming to the forefront, and they are going to change the conversation between artist and audience,” she concludes.

Look for this and other generational shifts as you continue your performing arts education and pursue a career in the field.

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.