As stage manager, my overall responsibility is to keep ‘the technical, or back-stage aspects of every performance in line with the director and designer’s original concept’ (Maccoy, 2005, 16). I shall be working on the technical aspects of the performance, keeping in with the director’s vision. However, as we do not have specific lighting and sound designers, we shall all be collaborating with ideas and the final decision shall be made by our director, Chloe.

With this devised piece, the first few rehearsals are dedicated ‘to explor[ing] and experiment[ing] with ideas, images, concepts, themes, or specific stimuli that might include music, text, objects, paintings, or movement’ (Oddey, 1996, 1), to obtain what works and what does not work within our piece. At this point in the process it is difficult for me to start my job on the technical aspects of the performance as the first rehearsals are for experimenting with ideas on our concept. However, through our lengthy discussions, I have in mind the director’s vision for the piece, although this may change slightly, I can start suggesting ideas as an outside eye because Chloe is an actor in the piece and I am the only one who is not performing.

With our concept following online identities and how the media controls the way in which society should look, Chloe, and our set designer Rosie, wanted the stage to reveal all of the technical aspects of creating a performance such as, exposed cables, live feeds, etc. We have also discussed the use of multiple videos and a lot of technical elements so I know that soon I shall be conducting a rather large cue sheet alongside Chloe’s technical requirements.

Works cited:

Maccoy, P. (2005). Essentials of Stage Management. New York: Routledge.

Oddey, A. (1996) Devising Theatre: a practical and theoretical handbook. London: Routledge.

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager

The start of our theatre company marks the beginning of the busy development process up until our debut performance at Lincoln performing Arts Centre in May 2015. Our theatre company name ‘JumpCut’ was recently sourced through our desire to create work that is abrupt in order to switch audience attention and senses quickly. We hope to make our debut performance as visually and emotionally stimulating as possible through our jump cutting manner.

JumpCut is a small company consisting of four members, and therefore, each member had to take on more than one job role. I decided to take on the role as stage manager as my main job within our company, alongside being the media editor. These roles appealed to me as a pair in order for me to edit videos and sound to how I would operate them on the day of our performance. This hopefully will make my stage manager role less problematic when it comes to constructing the cue sheets as I would know exactly how each media cue would start and end.

Through our first couple of meetings we have decided as a company that we want to create devised work as our ideas have already started flowing. We are all very keen and confident that our own ideas can be developed into a performance that creates an interesting talking point for the audience. The main topic that was central to each discussion we have had in this early stage has revolved around the idea of the ‘perfect’ online identity. We discussed how we, in today’s society, use social media as a platform to present the ideal side of one’s self. The trend of the ‘selfie’ and creating the perfect online persona through those selfies inspired us to look at our own experiences with the topic in order to make this piece truthful and relatable to our audience. As a company of all female artists we felt this would be a great route to go down as this topic relates to all four of us as regular social media users.

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager