Stage management team are usually responsible for:
- Booking and setting up rehearsal rooms
- Scheduling and calling artists, and keeping hours to contract
- Recording rehearsal progress and actions
- Advising director on technical and artistic matters
- Learning the show, and its artistic intentions
- Attending, calling meetings, and recording decisions
- Negotiating changes to planned actions
- Contacts with outside suppliers, gathering production material
- Planning and executing scene changes
- Cueing artists and technicians
- Health and safety throughout the process
- Movement of the show if touring
- Both discipline and pastoral care of company
They may also be responsibe for a vast range of other duties, dependant on circumstance.
The functions:
- Rehearsal organisational
- Artistic support and control
- Liaison, negotiation and arbitration
- Technical functions
- Strategic planning
This list can form the basis of work prioritisation – at any particular point, which is the most important function?
Dynamic view:
Conventionally, the pattern is broken down to time-based functions:
- Pre rehearsal preparations
- Rehearsal period
- Technical week
- Performances
- (Touring period)
- Post performance.
I prefer to look at phases of activity (or underlying principles of action)
- Gathering information
- Experiment or testing
- Decide on plan
- Implement
- Deal with consequences
This pattern is actually cyclical, and exists at different scales of resolution.
Contexts – Areas of activity
What is theatre?
- a building
- an activity
- a producing company
- an organisation
- an act of communication
- a social or cultural event
Types of theatre organisations
- ‘national’ companies
- Stage managers also apply their skills to:
- Event management
- Conferences
- Festivals
- Product launches
- Television stage management and floor management
commercial touring companies
- West End managements
- Regional repertory theatres
- Touring houses
- Civic theatres
- Amateur (‘little’) theatres
- Fringe theatres
- Site specific and immersive performance
- Circus
- ‘Applied’ theatre
- Theatre in education, and for Young People
- Theatre in prisons
- Forum and legislative theatre
- Therapeutic drama