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On January 10, 2022, Narda E Alcorn and Lisa Porter joined the EPIC Conference to talk about their book “Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice”. Here is a quick excerpt from their session. Watch the full session at the link below!
Matt Stern: welcome back to our next Epic session, and it’s my pleasure to welcome these next two. Narda and Lisa are two of the smartest, kindest, most generous people I know, both esteemed educators at two of the United States leading universities and have been shaping generations of stage managers and leaders for decades.
Both Lisa and Narda are passionate, creative artists and advocates dedicated to bringing positive change to our industry. They wrote the book Stage management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach and the essay “We commit to anti-racist stage management education”.
They are here to share their work and ideas with you. Narda, Lisa, thank you so much for being here. The stage is yours.
Narda Alcorn: Matt, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. . I am Narda E Alcorn. I use she, her hers pronouns. I am a black female. I have a round face round glasses and short black cropped hair. And I am sitting in front of two wooden closet doors, and I’m gonna toss it over to Lisa.
Lisa Porter: Thank you. Narda. Thank you to Matt and Anna for organizing this amazing conference. We’re really excited to be here live with you today. I use she, her, hers pronouns. I am a white woman with short brown hair. I’m wearing a black top and glasses.
Narda Alcorn: Lisa and I met in 1992, which feels like many lifetimes ago. We met at what was then called the Yale school of Drama. We were grad students and stage managers. And we became fast friends, a beautiful relationship developed that has continued almost 30 years now.
One of the things that has been so wonderful about our relationship is we’re all still committed to the discipline of stage management. We practice it and we both continue to work in stage management in very different pursuits and we teach it.
I’m going to let Lisa tell the amazing story of how we decided to write our book on Stage Management
Lisa Porter: Thank you. Narda. The book has eight chapters and today we’re going to do a tour of each chapter.
Taking you back to March of 2017, we both attended a conference here in the US called the United States Institute for Theater Technology. It is a conference for recruiting and networking. Our publisher Routledge had a table there. And I said to Narda, “Well, let’s go pitch. Let’s go pitch our book.”
We were somewhat unprepared in terms of having a really distilled elevator speech. And at the same time, I think this book had lived for many, many years. In fact, my husband would overhear the conversations that we would have about our students and about our work. He’d say, “you really need to start writing some of this down”.
So that led us to a pitch, that led to a proposal for the book. And I would say one of the only things that didn’t change from the start was the title. We came up with the title on the floor of the conference that day in a convention center when we met our wonderful publisher.
We wanted to start with the idea of theory and what different theories could stage managers call upon to actually fold into their work, to support the really complex production environments that we face across the board. So that’s what we did. We started to think about theory and how we would frame that and how the idea of theory guided practice would shape the book and lead us through the chapters.
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Anna Robb is Co-Founder and Managing Director for TheatreArtLife. Anna is an experienced Producer/Production Stage Manager. Her 20-year work history spans Asia Pacific, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. She has worked for companies such as Cirque du Soleil, Franco Dragone Entertainment Group, Christie Digital Systems and The Sydney Opera House. Anna was an integral part of the research and development, training and formation, creation and operation of the 250 million dollar aquatic show, The House of Dancing Water in Macau. She also maintained the daily operations of this complex show as the head of Stage Management for 7 years. Anna has been employed on over 70 shows in the areas of concerts, arena events, corporate events, trade shows, musical theatre, plays, dance, circus, outdoor festivals and mega shows. Anna holds a honours degree in Design for Theatre and Television and is passionate about the evolution of the industry.
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