Back a long time ago, the idea of blocking was pretty straightforward. It was really about stage picture. You stand there. Or I stand here. Or you sit on this line. Or I stand on this line. There are moments when making specific movements across the stage or movements on the set are prescribed in a precise way that we need you to do this now because of something that happens in the script.

But the truth is that much of what happens in blocking is a collaboration between actor and director. It is the exploration of the actor’s actions and needs in a given moment in a scene. It’s easy to take for granted something as simple as walking across a room or where you stand in a space. But the following simple examples may help you understand how meaningful blocking can be in the performing arts.

So, if you picture a fairly traditional theater with the audience on one side and the stage on the other, you can then imagine an actor standing in the middle of that space, facing the audience, in a stance that means something, right? This person is alone. Depending on how big the space is, we experience something about the scale of a human being in this space. We might think about how that person is or isn’t like us as an audience member.

Now, turn that person away from you so that they’re facing away. That’s right; they’re facing upstage. Suddenly, I lose all sorts of information. I can’t see that person’s face or expressions. As an audience member, I’ve lost information, but I’ve gained potential interest. You might not be aware of these perceptions unless you have a performing arts education.

Now, what if that person extends their arms really wide, opens their chest up, but I can’t see their face? You can imagine that any one of those choices makes a big difference to how we experience whatever that person says in that moment. But it can be challenging to interpret that person’s stance, movements, and gestures without the help of facial expressions.

It becomes even more exciting and complicated when you have multiple characters onstage. If I have two actors very far downstage, very close to the audience, huddled together, whispering to each other, my experience as an audience member is going to be one of tremendous intimacy.

But if I keep one of those actors very close and send another far away upstage, it’s going to change my relationship with one of them with whom I have a much closer, intimate relationship to that other person who is much further away. I might begin to have an empathic response to the person who’s closer compared to the one who’s more distant.

As an actor, it’s valuable to understand that your audience is experiencing, particularly in theater, your work as a kind of three-dimensional sculpture that’s constantly changing shape. As a director, it’s important to understand that everywhere that bodies are in space communicates something to your audience, as you might learn from an online performing arts education. So, it’s better for that communication to be intentional rather than accidental.

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.

Where does performing arts work happen? There’s a traditional, expected framework, particularly at this moment, that theater happens inside a theater. This idea is especially common in Europe and the Americas. You sit in a chair, and there’s a stage. It’s usually a proscenium stage, which means that there’s an imaginary fourth wall and the audience witnesses a kind of expected tradition.

In your performing arts education, you’ll learn that this inheritance has been disrupted in a lot of ways. For example, you may have experienced theater in the round or theater where you’re sitting on two sides of the stage or there are other configurations of the room. But the room is still localized in a theater.

Ruben Polendo points out that “there’s another kind of work that’s important, as it speaks to location. And it’s the idea of site-specific work.” Intended to disrupt the expectation that work happens in a theater, the idea of site-specific work is that theater work can happen anywhere, Polendo explains. “You can actually identify the site, so it can happen in the forest, in a park, in an abandoned bank. It can happen on a riverbed; it can happen in a lot of places.” So, the site becomes a key factor in the performance.

Immersive theater is a third type that’s important to understand in online performing arts education. Although the language for this has just become important recently, the style has been part of artistic practice for a very long time. Polendo views immersive theater as somewhat in line with the site-specific variety. “It often happens in unexpected places, though it has certainly happened in theaters,” he observes. “The idea is that you’re no longer bound to a sitting configuration, but actually you are immersed in the world of the piece. You’re actually surrounded by it … and your experience is now fully experiential. This is a very exciting kind of work to do.”

Harvey Young agrees. “There’s a liveness factor that is powerful. It’s worth celebrating,” he says. “And so I would say to anyone who is anxious or more concerned about going to the theater, ‘Don’t be.'” He adds that what’s wonderful about American theater is that it really aims to reach the people.

Young offers a case in point: When Amiri Baraka did “Dutchman,” it premiered in Greenwich Village. It drew an art crowd, the generation crowd of the time in the early 1960s. Baraka’s reaction was like, “‘No, no, no, I appreciate that crowd as well, but my people are up in Harlem.’ So he took the exact same production, and he moved it up to Harlem on the streets, and he did it at a street-corner theater.”

That made a huge difference across New York City, Young explains, “because now you had people across the entire island of Manhattan thinking about and living and inhabiting this play. So, that’s what you want. You want theater to be alive.

“A lot of people want to know what it takes to create theater and to start a theater company or put on a play for the first time. It sounds taxing at first. It sounds really difficult. Do I need to get a choreographer? Do I need to rent out a theater, an auditorium?”

Young downplays those concerns. “It’s not that big of a deal. All you need to create theater is a performer, a performer who is willing to perform in front of someone else,” he says, adding, “The basic definition of theater is someone performing before another person. It’s witnessed; it’s audienced. It’s two people sharing space together — one as witness, one as performer.”

As Polendo sees it, “One of the things that makes theater-making so exciting to me is that one of the responsibilities is not only that it’s live, but that it’s actually live in the sense that it’s constantly developing, that it’s consciously taking shape and constantly speaking to its time and of its time.”

Over time in history, Polendo notes, you see all sorts of cultures do exactly that, shaping theater into spaces of ritual or performance. They shape it into spaces where text is important or physicality is important.

“What’s exciting to me is that there is no trajectory of how theater develops,” Polendo says. “There’s this incredible map, and that map has to do with ideas and exchanges and migrations, and it’s there that theater comes alive.” He concludes, “If you want to think of the history of theater, don’t think of a line of theater developing, but think of this incredible map that’s coming from all sorts of directions.”

“One of the ongoing complaints that directors of the performing arts have, particularly about theater critics, is that they don’t recognize the work that directors actually do,” explains Elizabeth Bradley. “In other words, critics will look at a production and give actors credit for something that actually was the director’s contribution. Designers will sometimes get plaudits for something that, if the director hadn’t asked for it, the designer would never have come up with it. Actually understanding what it is that directors contribute can be hard to pin down.”

“Everything that is seen on stage goes through the director’s table,” adds Shanga Parker. “Theater, it’s very much a director’s medium. I think film and TV can be more of an actor’s medium, but it’s very much an editor’s medium because that’s the last step a film or TV show gets. It gets written by the writer, shot, and then it’s edited.”

In the theater, every decision that is made goes to the director’s hands and mind. The director gets a script, decides how to cast it, or thinks about right number of roles, male, female, what it’s going to look like. If it’s a family, does the family have to look like a family, or can it be a different racial and ethnic background?

“What kind of story are you trying to tell? If you decide to make it look like a family, that’s saying something. Right? Or you decide to break that up and put it on its head and make the audience look at the play, perhaps, in a new way,” says Parker.

What do we mean when we say the word “Broadway?” First of all, we mean that Broadway is a certain way of telling stories and understanding how to tell stories with music. Broadway doesn’t have to be a book musical necessarily. It’s this other kind of thing altogether, and there’s a vitality, a connection, and an energy from within that will never die.

There’s something about shows-topping numbers, there’s something about the spectacle, and there’s something about the flash of Broadway. Combined, we begin to see this hybrid thing that allows for other things to happen. Often, new or unexpected things. When we think about shows like “Oklahoma,” we can recognize these traits.

Performing Arts Done By Musicians

“Tommy” was a musical by The Who. The band wanted to tell a story, but they were also rock musicians, so they combined the two for one ultimate experience. There are other music-heavy shows like this, too. Stew and Heidi did a show called “Passing Strange,” and then there’s the famous show “Hair.” There is a story happening in all of these shows, but you are experiencing them in different ways — often in a way that is closer to a concert.

British Invasion

Americans started to have a greater appreciation for some of the British Broadway shows, including “Phantom of the Opera,” written and produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Another favorite was “Miss Saigon,” produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Mackintosh was making large shows that revolved around the spectacle of the theater. His performances were all about singing, dancing, and movement. Of course, they were also about the story, but the spectacle was equally as important.

Music Is Key

There’s both a connection and a separation between the music that folks are listening to on the street and the music in a Broadway musical that takes years to develop. Music is popular because people are listening to it right now, and it’s providing them with something at that moment. When people hear music from Broadway shows like “Tommy” outside of the theater, they question it. “What’s that sound? Where is it coming from? I’m not in the theater right now. I want to see the stories that are told with this sound.”

Because of this, you see many people trying to understand the global power of music. Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to pull all of that together in a way. He has this encyclopedic understanding of the hip-hop and rap phenomenon, and he also has a deep knowledge of the history of American musical theater.

Lin-Manual Miranda put his knowledge of music and history together in a wildly successful story about the founding figures of the United States and the American Revolution. The twist was that the cast was primarily made of people of color. This show was popping because it showed multiple forms and multiple ways to use them. Broadway can hold all kinds of stuff.

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?”