Dramatics Magazine: MAYBE YOU’RE JOINING the technical crew for the first time. Maybe you’re a seasoned student technician ready to move up the ranks. Either way, to succeed in technical theatre — whether you want a leadership role (stage manager, house manager, student shop foreman) or just to deepen your current skills — you need to understand how to help your theatre director in three important ways: recruiting, maintaining, and building a strong team.
3 comments:
Although this is obviously geared towards high schoolers and a typical high school theatre department, I was in that position a year ago, so many of the lessons espoused in the article still ring true to me. Getting into stage management (or rather, letting myself be forcefully guided into it) was probably the best thing I could’ve done from a leadership and personal standpoint in our department. I learned how to lead without being the Big Boss Man, how to guide and help and keep the train on the tracks without anyone ever knowing it was veering off. Being able to lead my peers is a skill that I am incredibly grateful to have developed early on in high school, as it led to further opportunities in my high school department, and it continues to reap benefits as I’m currently managing an Imaginarium team. Graceful management is a hard skill to learn, and it is a constant balance to strike.
This is a really great article for high school students in technical theatre. I feel like the information for many high school tech programs is so limited. I, for one, had no prior knowledge of how to make a portfolio or artistic resume or anything like that. We had to create our high school hierarchies for David’s class so we all saw how wildly each of our high schools approached the structure of their tech crew, so this article gives a nice basis of what should be standard in each organization in order to have an effective crew. I feel like a lot of these lessons would be really useful and would have really improved the crew situation at my high school, so I think there needs to be more information like this for high schools. This is a great step in the right direction and I will definitely pass it along to my high school TD.
This article really takes me back to high school in the best way. I did stage management for three years and was our Thespian VP and President. I was about as involved in our department as you could get. A lot of these things I tried to do on my own to give myself a foundation I could build from to be a productive and successful leadership figure in our department. My priority as an SM was facilitating communication, offering opportunities for self growth to my crew, and taking steps to move the department in the direction of applying these skills at festivals or professionally. What made my high school experience so rewarding was the overwhelmingly positive response I got from my peers as a result of these goals. That was largely an influencer in discovering my own career goals and understanding my strengths as a leader. The article talks about building yourself by understanding and learning to help build others, and I think this is a wonderful way to introduce theatre to students.
Post a Comment