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Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: ASM??
« on: Nov 30, 2007, 12:46 am »
I'm totally in the same situation. I've been stage managing in community theatres and at school for almost ten years now. I've always done my job by myself. I've had very supportive casts and directors that have made it a decently easy process. However, now that I'm about to graduate, my theatre instructor has asked me to create "clones" of myself. He was personally never a SM so he doesn't feel qualified to train anyone else to take on that position.
Luckily I didn't have to try too hard to get some one who was interested...in fact, there are several of people that approached me about the job. There are two that are seriously perusing it enough that they want to work as my ASM. I'm worried that I won't be able to efficiently teach them everything they need to know. I expressed my concern to my director, and his only suggestion was that I do my job the same way I always do and allow them to "witness me in action." And while I do feel that there is a great deal you can learn through observation, it doesn't fully prepare you to take over.
Through my school, I'm working as SM on two shows right now. My instructor decided to put one on each show. One of the shows that I'm doing is Romeo and Juliet, which will be pretty typical as far as my job goes. However, the other show is called The Love Suicides at Sonozaky and we're performing it as a traveling show in the Bunraku style (Japanese theatre using complete puppets as actors.) Because of all of the complex elements involved in this show, it's really going to be testing my abilities. I'm going to be learning so much during this show, I'm not quite sure how to me teaching at the same time.
As much as I love it, this job does seem to get really hard sometimes. Hopefully, I'll be able to get through this whole thing and my ASMs will get out of it what they want.
Hopefully,
Kimberly
Luckily I didn't have to try too hard to get some one who was interested...in fact, there are several of people that approached me about the job. There are two that are seriously perusing it enough that they want to work as my ASM. I'm worried that I won't be able to efficiently teach them everything they need to know. I expressed my concern to my director, and his only suggestion was that I do my job the same way I always do and allow them to "witness me in action." And while I do feel that there is a great deal you can learn through observation, it doesn't fully prepare you to take over.
Through my school, I'm working as SM on two shows right now. My instructor decided to put one on each show. One of the shows that I'm doing is Romeo and Juliet, which will be pretty typical as far as my job goes. However, the other show is called The Love Suicides at Sonozaky and we're performing it as a traveling show in the Bunraku style (Japanese theatre using complete puppets as actors.) Because of all of the complex elements involved in this show, it's really going to be testing my abilities. I'm going to be learning so much during this show, I'm not quite sure how to me teaching at the same time.
As much as I love it, this job does seem to get really hard sometimes. Hopefully, I'll be able to get through this whole thing and my ASMs will get out of it what they want.
Hopefully,
Kimberly