Messages

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Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: Looking for Stage Management workshop ideas

« on: Oct 31, 2007, 08:13 pm »

Me again! I don't know if I should start a separate thread about this or what, but...

If you don't mind me picking your collective brain once more, I'm looking for your stories, your experiences with conflict resolution in a theatre setting. Basically I just want to know what the problem was, and how you resolved it. I can come up with a few scenarios on my own (and I've trolled the old threads on this forum, too, heheh) but on the whole, I have been lucky enough to not have had any MAJOR conflicts come up during any productions where I've been the SM so I'm trying to find some real-life experiences.

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate your input.

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Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: Calling attention

« on: Oct 30, 2007, 01:15 pm »

One theatre group I work with regularly (a cast of between 50-75, made up of non-theatre-major university students...not much different than high school, really) has a traditional way of getting the attention of the group, and it's explained to people at the read-through...the person yells "quiet please" and the group responds with "THANK YOU" (as loudly as they possibly can). The idea is that you say the "thank you" and then stop talking and pay attention to the person who shouted the "quiet please". The other idea is that if not everyone hears the "quiet please", everyone will definitely hear the "thank you" and know something is going on. It works remarkably well, for us, anyway.

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Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: Looking for Stage Management workshop ideas

« on: Oct 18, 2007, 09:02 am »

Participant experience will probably range from "absolutely none" to people with experience that's similar to my own.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, I especially like the ones about writing blocking as people move around and calling a few pages from a script. And yeah, I was thinking about doing some conflict resolution stuff too.

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Students and Novice Stage Managers / Looking for Stage Management workshop ideas

« on: Oct 17, 2007, 01:44 pm »

Hi there, I'm new here, although I used to hang out at SMNetwork.org several years ago, before it turned into this forum thing. But this forum thing is neat!

Anyway...I am an amateur SM with extensive community theatre experience. The theatre I work with primarily is going to be hosting a series of free workshops, and I have put in a proposal to run a stage management workshop aimed at the aspiring community theatre stage manager.

I already have LOTS of material to discuss, but what I was hoping I could gain from posting here is maybe some ideas for actual interactive workshop type stuff. I don't want to just lecture for the entire three hour time slot, but I'm having a hard time coming up with interactive things for people to do that could help them learn to be better stage managers.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.