Tag: zoom

10 Things I Learned About Performing for a Virtual Audience

Out of all of the play readings that I’ve been involved with, preparing and performing for a virtual zoom reading last year was truly unique. I learned a lot about myself both as a performer and individual trying to grapple with this new reality. Preparing and performing for a virtual audience was both challenging and exciting. Here are 10 things that I learned:

In Virtual Veritas: Directing and Teaching Online

Like so many of you, last fall I embarked on teaching and directing online with trepidation. I thought my goal was to make the classroom and the event of the play feel as if it were all happening in person. To be honest, I tried to prepare for anything that could go wrong with virtual-ness of it. But after working through the initial discomfort, I learned that directing and teaching acting online, wasn’t all that different from the process of making theatre in a new space altogether. I knew this road. I was trained on how to make a rehearsal space or classroom conducive to experience of exploring a play. Moreover, I had simply fallen into my usual process of listening and reacting to how the distinctiveness of the space could be used to further illuminate the story. This time, it just happened to be a totally virtual space.

Taking Risks: Now Is the Time to Tackle Your Most Challenging Project

“Welcome to the first music rehearsal! We’re going to try running through the harmonies, and see how it goes.”

The Pursuit of Liveness: Performing Arts and Covid

I look at the recent trends in Covid-19 theatre as a search for ‘Live’-ness. The concept of liveness takes from the word of experiencing a performance ‘Live’. This entails with the experience having to be immediate, to be in-person to experience the thing being performed. Most of the performing arts predicates on an audience member encountering the artwork in person. A theatre/dance piece is staged and blocked for where an audience sits, and even for music acts, the sound engineer takes into account the equalising of the sound for a curated experience of the music. The value of liveness is that it is the linchpin of the performing arts, and with Covid-19 unpinning that, the world is a tumble. A lot of us are now searching for new ways to make meaning with our craft, with the skills that promote and thrive on immediacy and liveness.

My Zoom Stage Manager Experiment

What a time to be alive. I have a Google alert set on “stage manager” and every day I get an email with a listing of articles published online that mention stage manager. Early on in quarantine, I saw an interview with the Pandemic Players and thought, “oh, that’s interesting.”