(Show Day Snap from Kearns 2015)
The time has come and now has passed and what a crazy, insightful experience it has been. Being stage manager for Forefront Theatre has been amazing and I’m glad that it was with this company that I explored my first ever experience of being Stage Manager. Over the past few months I have enjoyed watching the company grow and come from nothing to a piece that explores the expectations of what society suggests you need to fill. At the beginning of the process I took on the responsibility of organising rehearsals and making sure everyone knew where they had to be and what time. Also as we was devising a piece from scratch it was very difficult to work with the lighting and sound designer Clare to discuss designs for our performance, this was an ongoing process that came together mostly towards the end of the process before tech day. The piece was a huge success in getting across what we wanted, however as we all know, there is always room for improvement.
Our debut performance of Shoes to Fill in terms of the technical aspects of the performance went smoothly. During the runs we did on performance day, there was a unanimous decision, with the support of Diane, that during two of our original songs the cast sang better a cappella than with the backing track. With this decision being made it meant that my Qlab file had to be updated, to make sure all the cues still flowed correctly. After this was edited I sat and went through the cues without the cast in order to make sure they were all in the correct order. Even with these last minute changes the performance still went well. As the performance wasn’t very tech heavy, as we didn’t have any projections and very little sound files, it all depended on the lighting to get across what we wanted, for example for each verbatim there was the use of a steel blue spotlight, on a microphone, which was always downstage left. These choices of lighting were very specific to each moment and scene of the performance. During rehearsals for our piece there were scenes where we used torches in a blackout, when rehearsing these scenes it was difficult to see the effectiveness this has, this was for many reasons. Some including that we weren’t on stage so we couldn’t tell if the torches were powerful enough in the space, another being that we could never get a full blackout either. It turned out that the torches looked really good in the space and something that stood out in the piece.
I feel this process has been a great experience with me and has really opened my eyes into what goes on behind the scenes to performances. It would be nice if Shoes to Fill wasn’t just a one time performance for Forefront Theatre but with the cast all from various different parts of the country this may prove to be a challenge. The company has plenty of room to grow, if it was to do so. This is the end of one journey for us, but there is nothing stopping this from being the last.
Works Cited
Kearns, E (2015) Show Day Snap