Stage Directions: Over the course of 75 years, as cueing technology was continuously updated, it drastically altered how a show was called and how the audience perceived the performance. As noted in my article on bells and whistles, the prompter performed an aural role in the production, one that was noticed and acknowledged by audience members.
12 comments:
Being an aspiring stage manager, this article immediately caught my eye. While reading this article I learned, i.e the title, about the history of the progressed advances with technology in the backstage world. Before the systems and technology that we have now, stage management was a lot tougher. Innately, a stage manager should be a fly on the wall, but with ascarse amount of tools to do so, it was basically impossible to not being vocal. Stage managers used to have to go get the actors and scream across stage to get something. Now we have intercoms and headsets where conversations flow easily and quietly without having to move from ones work station where no one can see the. The quote at the end of the article especially stuck with me, “Poor stage management brings about a poor performance and good stage management means a smooth performance – so smooth sometimes that the audience is quite likely to forget that someone must have been responsible”. I loved this quote because it encapsulates the job and objective of a stage manager. This quote just made so much sense, and resonated with me on a personal level.
This is such an interesting series! I read the other two mentioned in this article as well and they are just as worth giving a look. The fact that a stage manager was once a much larger presence which was audible and sometimes visible to the audience is so mind-boggling to me considering how they are viewed today. The switch boards article here is also interesting to think about. This system seems to lead directly towards the headsets we use today, but something that caught my attention was how they were used to call actors to the stage. I have actually see these used even in today's theaters although they are more inconspicuous than a loud buzzer in a dressing room. When shadowing at a different university in my junior year of high school, the stage manager had a small board with switches that turned on small lights in different areas backstage. They worked as cue lights for both the crew and actors and made transitions happen much faster. Most shows do not need this kind of outdated technology, but this particular theater was an oddly shaped black box made even more difficult by the set design so it was easier to use cue lights than for the actors to trust their intuition on entrances.
It is amazing how simple improvements in technology can change theater. Technology is so rarely invented for the theater industry so we take the technology presented and make it suit our needs. Not only did the switchboard change the job of a prompter by streamlining communication, but it also changed how the fourth wall interacted with the audience. Having a prompter encouraged a rowdy audience because the illusion was broken. Once the illusion could be kept in tact, audiences started to behave more quietly, like how they do today. I wonder if how audiences will respond to theater will change now that more shows intentionally break the fourth wall. I see a potential for a theatrical experience where people feel encouraged to vocally talk to the performer. Will the audience continue to adapt to the theater we present them? It will be interesting to see how audiences behave in the future. That being said, I greatly enjoyed the article and learning about theatrical history.
It is so easy to forget just how much more complicated the job of a stage manager would be without the technology that we have today. Today it is easy for the Stage Manager to focus on verbally calling the show without having to worry about switch boards and call boys. It is interesting to learn about the methods of the past and see just how far the technology has come. Even at CMU we are blessed with state of the art equipment that is easy to forget is a blessing. There have been several times that I have worked somewhere else where they didn't have systems in place or had make shift solutions that were much more difficult to work with.
To imagine a theater where stage management was not behind the scenes is unbelievable. Today, it seems that to make a great production, the stage managers must be nearly invisible. It’s also reassuring that stage managers have always been an integral part of theater. When something has been a part of theater for so long, it changes and morphs and becomes the best version of itself. With all this new technology, the job of stage manager has become more complex because there are more capabilities and jobs that the stage manager can do without disturbing the audience. They currently use wireless clear-coms as a form of communication. While they most definitely are a step up from using call/run boys, they are still relatively heavy and clunky to carry around, especially if the stage manager is crawling or climbing around backstage. I wonder what the next great invention in stage management technology will be.
As with the cue lights, it's so easy to forget that it hasn't always been this way. Thinking about how this allowed two parties to converse with each other easily is a wonderful thing, but then when you think about the tech process it seems insane that multi-channel conversation was simply not possible. As a Stage Manager, this must have been a huge thing to learn, as you now had to concentrate on patching through to different people throughout the performance, in addition to all other duties. The system of confirmed calls between the Stage Manager and the dressing rooms is fascinating, and something that I quite frankly we will had in place today. It is so funny to think about all of this technology that we truly take for granted, and how innovative it was at the time. As the writer mentions in the last paragraph, it is curious to think about how theatre has evolved over the years and how technology has shaped how people experience it, both from backstage and audience perspectives. Did theatre quiet down to match the new audience etiquette, or did audiences change their behavior to match the new, quieter, theatre-going experience? If technology and customs had not changed, would Stage Managers be as involved with the audience as Music Directors/Conductors?
Learning the history of certain technical theatre practices can teach one so much about their position. Stage managers facilitate the run of the show, but they should never be the focus. This article emphasizes the importance of tech “blending in” so the focus can be on the story onstage. The best tech is the one that goes unnoticed and doesn’t infringe on the integrity of the production. This is not to say that stage management and the rest of the crew is unimportant. This article delves into the creative ways stage managers have implemented switchboards, cue lights, and headsets to allow productions to flow seamlessly. The primary goals being to have the audience forget who is behind the scenes, which has been improved tremendously with cueing technology. When a scene change occurs so effortlessly that one doesn’t notice it has occurred until the next scene begins, one knows that the communication of the management team is incredibly strong.
I think that it is interesting that we are now looking back at the cutting edge of technology from 1929 with a kind of fondness and understanding of how much farther we have come. I find it intriguing that they mention the use of call boys who would run back to the stage manager to confirm the call was received and how that was no longer needed due to this new system being in place. However, in many places today with our modern wireless com we have seemed to have lost this confirmation norm, that may still be a good thing to have. I find that the quote at the end of the article still rings true to this day. "Poor stage management brings about a poor performance and good stage management means a smooth performance" the fact is that today we have come very far from what it was, but we always need to remember how it has been done in order to learn and improve going forward.
This article does a nice job of outlining just how far behind the theater world is with respect to the “cutting edge.” My brain immediately jumps to the idea the theatre is always ten years behind the rest of the world. I have to wonder why this is, is it because the people in the industry are reluctant to change or maybe it is too expensive for a theatre to adopt a new protocol where the cost-benefit doesn’t prove to be negative.
Cueing technology, in particular, has remained pretty much the same for years. Aside from the improvements made to com systems, many theatres around the world still use methods that date back to the 30’s and 40’s. Hey, if it works why change it, but it is cool to think about how advanced theatre applications could be if they stayed up to date with the tech world.
I always enjoy reading about historical theatre technology and how it has grown from what we view as primitive to what we use today! I thought this was a great look at how stage management technology has grown and how the SM role has changed along with that, and thought it was interesting how the role used to be much more obtrusive than it currently is. I had assumed that before technology allowed for quiet and fast communication between roles like it does now, the stage manager’s role would be much more diminished (for example, remaining backstage and only calling deck changes, while the light and sound operators ‘called their own cues’) but it was interesting to see that that was not the case. I also found it interesting that technology allowed SMs to fade more into the background, leading to the philosophy that “if the audience knows the SM exists, something’s gone wrong”, and that maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if not for technology. It would be interesting to see a world in which the backstage workings of theatre were more visible to the audience, but some would view that as destroying the illusions that they came to see.
I had no idea that stage managers had ever been anything other than stage managers. Or that prompters would prompt actors in the middle of a performance.. that seems crazy by today’s standards. I guess I had never given much thought at all to what happened before intercoms. It makes sense that before coms there were switchboards, but bells and whistles before that baffles me. It seems even before electricity a solution might have been devised that would be quieter, a system of manipulating signs or something. Then again, the article does mention that for a long time these sounds were in fact a part of the performance. I would be interested in seeing a show produced in this manner, but I can’t imagine anyone still does this, as likely the only people interested would be historians and theatre people, an admittedly small demographic. Even so, maybe a historical theatre like the globe might find value in such a production.
Post a Comment