What was very different for me in preparing for a musical that isn’t always covered in performing arts education is something called a sitzprobe. I had never heard of it before, but it’s when you go and, for the first time, you actually sing with the orchestra. You’re in the room with them, and it’s terrifying and thrilling.

The other thing that needs to be covered more in online performing arts education is that it’s such a big group of people on such a large stage that they literally have handlers backstage. You don’t even have to know your cue. Somebody literally comes into your dressing room, takes you where you’re supposed to enter, and pushes you on at the time you’re supposed to go. I mean, there are no accidents here, and I know it wasn’t just for me. I know that’s what they do because I’m pretty good at knowing when to walk on the stage. But it was both frightening to give up that control and kind of comforting to be taken care of in that way.

One thing that’s important to think about in your online performing arts education is that there are many differences between designing costume for film and designing for the theater, the opera, or music. “I think the biggest difference is that in theater, you see the whole costume, you see the whole person, and you see actors all together,” says Durinda Wood. “Shoes are also really important because they are usually in the audience’s eye line.”

Durinda explains how background design affects designing costumes for the theater: “The background is very stationary. You know exactly what that background’s going to be. … Artistically, it’s much easier to design for theater and opera and know that your vision is going to be the way that you designed it.”

“I love theater and opera. I always thought that I would be a theater designer,” Durinda says. She notes that “one thing about the opera is that the singers are just singers. They’re not necessarily actors. And they’re much less demanding, I would say, about their costumes. I think they really just want to be able to sing. That’s their most important thing.” She adds that sometimes simple changes are called for, like loosening a collar or vest to allow an opera singer enough room to vocalize comfortably.

If you consider a career in costume design as you pursue your performing arts education, it’s nice to know that Durinda also says she’s found that both opera singers and theater actors enjoy working with costume designers and treat them with respect.

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.

In the world of performing arts, there are multiple different categories, or “buckets,” of theatrical performances. We have a canon of work in which the plays are performed in what would be known as elevated language. In this bucket, you could put the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe. You could also put in the restoration comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. You could even put in latter-day 20th-century verse plays by playwrights like Maxwell Anderson.

When it rhymes, or when the language is particularly poetic or unusual, that would certainly be one canon. And Shakespeare, for one, is still among the most frequently produced playwrights across the United States. Here in New York, we have the New York Shakespeare Festival in the public theaters that still remain committed to classical work. So that covers the first bucket.

There is also another bucket, which consists of new playwriting—plays that have not been produced previously in a professional context. Oftentimes, these plays can be written in everyday conversational language. However, of course, the language of these plays varies enormously from context to context and playwright to playwright.

For example, an Irish playwright like Seán O’Casey or a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh would be writing in an Irish dialect, but they’re also experimenting with form enormously. So you could have a black comedy, you could have elements of horror in what is a conversational text-based play. As you can see, it gets harder and harder to actually come up with the different bucket labels for genres.

Playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, of course, represent a form of 19th-century naturalism, which was all about character and closely observed character. Now, certain American directors are approaching that work and staging the context in which those plays appear so that we will either discover them anew or see them differently.

Spectacle theater is represented, in some cases, by the Greeks although it is certainly possible to do an intimate production of a Greek play. There has been a tremendous interest, particularly in the last 20 years, in physical theater, in which the movement is certainly as important, or perhaps even more important, than the words.

You can learn much more about the history of theater and the many different forms it takes by exploring online performing arts education. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits and lessons of performing arts education from the comfort of your own home.