Scott Illingsworth tells us that an actor will eventually understand the arc of the story and the world that a character inhabits. That’s the moment to begin zooming in a little tighter on their character’s experience of the script. That’s the time to begin exploring some of the things we often think of more as acting exercises.

He goes on to say, ” I think, especially because working on a role often starts with a piece of text — and sometimes, even the process of looking at the scripts can feel like an academic or analytical process — that it can be easy to forget, in those early stages, that acting is a physical art form. It’s a craft of constructing something over time the way any trade constructs things over time. And the way you construct it is with your body.” This is important to any performing arts education, including online performing arts education.

Working on a role often starts with a piece of text. Sometimes, even the process of looking at the scripts can feel like an academic or analytical one. It can be easy to forget, in those early stages, that acting is a physical art form. It’s a craft of constructing something over time. In the same way any trade constructs things over time, you construct with your body.

Scott thinks actors should develop a tool toolkit that includes using their bodies to explore the world from the beginning. He often discusses with his students how important it is to understand the way your mind works with the rest of your body. “For a long time, we talked about acting as either thinking or doing,” he explains. “We talked about this separation between the mind and the body or working from the outside in or the inside out.”

He feels that the more we understand human beings, the more we understand that this separation is false. Your thoughts influence the way your body exists in space and what you do. All the experiences and events that happen to your body change your thoughts. It’s a continuous integration cycle. It’s important that actors understand this as soon as possible. It should be before they get into a room with other actors or before they get on the set.

It means things like taking a script and traveling around a studio, or even your home, as you explore the world. Does this person change spaces? Do they move from room to room? Are they doing an activity during this scene? What does it mean for you to explore that same activity? What does it mean to say these words while you do some of the things this person does?

Even something as simple as that, acting out the things that the person does, puts your body in space doing things while you speak those words. “And it has a profound impact on people when they really begin to understand how physical an experience acting is for both the performer and the audience,” he concludes.

When determining how to approach a script in Performing Arts, one should take a play like “A Raisin in the Sun”—Lorraine Hansberry’s very, very famous play from the early ’60s. The play starts. You’re reading the pages. What you’ll see on the page first is a little epigram. You’ll see what is almost a little poem, and it’s written by Langston Hughes. It’s basically what happens to a dream deferred. Does it fester-does it “dah, dah, dah,” or does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

That point is meant to set the mood of the play. It’s meant to make you think. It’s meant to hint at what will happen in the play. It is also there to make readers question who is Langston Hughes?

That’s the first place to start. Readers in online performing arts education should adopt the mindset: “Let me find out about who this Langston Hughes is and why would Lorraine Hansberry put that poem on page one before the play even starts?” Then you start with the play, and you look at the stage directions and see what that tells you.

The stage directions tell those in performing arts education that you’re in a sort of a cramped, crowded, tenement apartment in Chicago in the late ’50s or early ’60s. Readers know that it’s cramped because you see a little boy asleep on the couch, and that’s where he sleeps every night. You see another room on the stage. You see a woman who wakes the little boy up.

The reader now understands what’s going on in the story. By the description of the apartment and the stage directions, one understands the family doesn’t have money. Knowing these facts is important things to understanding the characters in the story and the basis for the play. Readers see a black family that doesn’t have money, living in a very crowded situation. You see the wife waking up the son and then waking up her husband.

As the play moves along, readers understand the grandmother — the father’s mother, the little boy’s grandmother — also lives in this cramped apartment, and the family defers to her in a certain way. Very early on, the reader understands that the day portrayed in the play is a very big day. This is a day the family has been waiting on; the grandmother is supposed to finally get the insurance check she’s been waiting on since her husband passed away. The check is supposed to be substantial, and getting this money is going to change the lives of the entire family.

Understanding the family’s misery is due to poverty, what day it is, and why getting this long-awaited check is so important to the family helps readers to analyze the show. Readers will understand that Walter — the father — is a character who is unhappy with his life. However, Walter doesn’t seem to understand how to get the thing that is going to make life better (namely money). He feels constrained by the role society has put on him in his work as a chauffeur. Walter is not the type of person who can simply walk into a bank and secure a loan. The family is growing but unable to get another, larger apartment.

The family doesn’t have money. The expected check could be the ticket to any number of things. For the grandmother, it may be the ticket for a better life for her herself and for her family. For her son Walter, the check is likely to be the ticket for him to make a better life for the family.

A tremendous collaborative bond between design team members is essential for a successful production. The team can consist of a designer to do the mise en scene, scenic surround and setting; a sound designer, since soundscapes are becoming ever more important; a costume designer; a lighting designer and a projection designer. These are all people who can conceptualize where the writer and the director want to go and the kind of imagery and atmosphere that are necessary.

In some kinds of creative processes, the director may meet for many weeks with the design team before they ever meet a company of actors, and all that work may be done beforehand and just presented to the actors on the first day. With other kinds of processes, the designers are in the room from the very beginning and assisting while the piece is being invented and coming together. The later scenario is often called “devised theater,” which is a form of collective creation in experimental theater.

Traits of a Unified Design Team

We must think about the quality of the design team: Is the design team complementary to the actors who go out there on stage with the weight of the storytelling mostly on their shoulders? Are they happy to be working together? Are they all committed to the work in the same way and for the same reasons? Is there both a selflessness and an assertiveness about what they’re bringing to the process?

These questions help us to determine if we will see, as every day this magical alchemy knits together in the rehearsal room, the sum of the parts becoming something actually transcendent for an audience.

Unfortunately, you can have what I call “dream teams” that go nowhere. You can have the best producers and the most in-demand director. You can have justifiably venerated senior members of the acting profession. You can have the hottest new talent making their debut. You can put it all together, and you just come up with complete goop, because there are no guarantees. Yet, if you have a unified quality design team framework in mind, the likelihood that something will knit together is probably greater than not.

Performing Arts Education

Your online performing arts education provides you with knowledge and tools that can someday help you to form and manage or be a part of a unified design team. It can also help you to recognize early warning signs of trouble when members of a team aren’t meshing well with each other, actors or anyone else involved in a production.

With the right education, you can learn how to sell a theatrical production to the largest audience and increase your profit margins.

As a performing arts producer, it’s not just about producing a good story to release to the public; it’s about finding the best team to promote the play and sell it to the public. That’s what people are interested in, the next part that their favorite action star or romance debutant is doing. A performing arts education can teach you how to pick the right team to handle each particular job. With the right people in the right places, you can have more exposure and build up a bigger audience.

To support the author and creative team in performing arts, you need to have your advertising reach your audience through all your marketing channels. Most people have a smartphone and other smart devices, so they often check in on Facebook and Instagram to see what is happening in entertainment and their friends’ and family members’ lives. The advertising team, marketing team, social media/digital media team, and the management team are the ones to sell the show to the public by presenting the starring actors and actresses to their audience.

Advertising and marketing the stars to the audience has nothing to do with the creative elements but more so the artistic ones. After the audience is brought together, the artistic element is passed over to those stars to practice their artistry. As the producer and sometimes the press representative, I have weekly meetings with my teams to follow their direction in the promotion strategy. With technology evolving, social and digital media has played a large part in the promotion efforts. Online performing arts education will help you find success in the entertainment industry.

What is an Actors’ Union? Just like with any other union, these organizations can help performing arts students and actors network and find like-minded people to spend their time with.

“There’s a Screen Actors Guild for media,” says Jeff Kaplan. “There’s also a union for stage called Actors’ Equity.” The majority of Equity actors are not working, so the Equity card that comes with the Actors’ Equity union doesn’t guarantee actors work, but it does help get them access to higher-level productions and jobs.

“They set pay scales. That’s probably the one that performers are most interested in, but they do other things. They provide basic minimums for workplace safety, the number of hours you can work, what time you have to be done, how you resolve conflicts during productions. They have health insurance.”

Joining an Actors’ Union

Getting into one of these unions can be tricky. In order to join a union, you have to perform in plays that are union-only, which results in a chicken-and-egg situation: how do you get into a union-only play if you’re not yet a union member? These unions have apprenticeship programs set up that allow a handful of non-union actors to perform, but the number of actors is kept at that handful in order to keep the union’s roster exclusive.

Is there a downside to joining an actors’ union? The union will provide actors with a lot of opportunities, but it does limit their actors as well. For instance, if you are a part of an actors’ union, you have to get written permission to perform in a non-union play, which is why not everyone chooses to join a union. They like to keep their options fully open, but on the flip side, they are limited to only working non-union plays.

When seeking a performing arts education, whether it’s an online performing arts education or an in-person one, students usually have a lot of questions about unions, like how to join one or whether or not you should. It’s made more complicated by the number of unions out there. “In brief,” says Shanga Parker, “there’s AEA. That is the union for theater actors and stage managers. And then there’s SAG-AFTRA. They’re combined now. Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists-they used to be separate, now they are one. And that is for film and TV.

Each union has a different way of becoming a member. AEA, or the Actors’ Equity Association, allows actors to submit paperwork after being cast in one of their specified shows. Once an actor joins a show that counts for the union and submits the paperwork, they’re considered an Equity Membership Candidate, or EMC. As an actor works on an Equity production, they accrue points week by week. Once they’ve built up enough points, they can join AEA.

However, AEA requires an initiation fee alongside the point requirement. That initiation fee has varied over the years, but it’s usually to the sum of a couple thousand dollars.

SAG-AFTRA works similarly in that you can get cast in a union role and choose to take it or not. The difference with SAG-AFTRA is that membership is affected by something called the Taft Hartley Act, which was written for a different reason but applies to the union. Essentially, the Taft Hartley Act gives you the choice of joining the union upon taking your first union role, but declining is also an option. That said, if you take a second union role, you’re required to join the union at that point, and there’s an initiation fee of a couple thousand dollars as well. Actors need to weigh the benefits of union membership with the initiation fee and plan accordingly.

The first thing you want to think about after you figure out for whom you are making a performing arts production is the quality of articulation of the story that’s being told. If you’re dealing with a script, and it’s written in vernacular, everyday language, is it as strong as it could be? Do you believe that the writer has a singular voice and talent that is ready for and deserves to be nurtured by full production?

Sometimes producer Elizabeth Bradley thinks that some of the most promising early playwrights are lost because they’re simply produced as needed and not produced as ready. Another problem that can occur is that they’d be much better writers if they were produced more frequently, earlier on, because, like everything else, it’s a craft. You get better at it, but where a particular writer will fall on that spectrum comes down to the play, the writer, and the piece.

In performing arts education or online performing arts education, you’ll learn to explore all of these essential questions. Do you have the right match of director? Does the director actually have a sense of conviction of what the sensibility of the piece needs? Can they partner with the writer? If they’re doing a revival of a classic play and they’re completely reinventing something, is the reinventing trenchant? Is it necessary?

When Malini Singh McDonald did Black Henna, for the first show they did a reading, and then they knew they were going to do a full production. They knew the first step would be to think about how much money this was going to cost. That’s always the first step in performing arts. How much money is this going to cost?

It’s so important to think it through, and luckily there are budgets that you can find in online performing arts education to give you an idea of how much each area is going to cost, more or less. Areas to consider are your space, your rehearsal space, because those are two separate things unless you can get a package, PR, music, and licensing.

In McDonald’s experience, they kind of had a budget but then forgot some line items like insurance. They begged, borrowed, and stole before coming up with their current style of finding investors. They just reached out to people and said, “Hey, we need X amount of dollars to get us to this point.” Thankfully, people loved them, and they loved people, so a lot of people were able to just give them the money.

Having learned from this experience though, they ended up in future productions really getting clear about the budget and then thinking about how they’re going to actually fund it. Not to say they don’t beg and borrow anymore. There are times they need to ask for more money because something comes up. One thing to learn in performing arts education is to always expect the unexpected.

For example, let’s say you budgeted $2,500 for this line item, and then it turns out to be $4,000 just because stuff happens. Plan ahead, stick to your budget, but budget for the unexpected.

What was very different for me in preparing for a musical that isn’t always covered in performing arts education is something called a sitzprobe. I had never heard of it before, but it’s when you go and, for the first time, you actually sing with the orchestra. You’re in the room with them, and it’s terrifying and thrilling.

The other thing that needs to be covered more in online performing arts education is that it’s such a big group of people on such a large stage that they literally have handlers backstage. You don’t even have to know your cue. Somebody literally comes into your dressing room, takes you where you’re supposed to enter, and pushes you on at the time you’re supposed to go. I mean, there are no accidents here, and I know it wasn’t just for me. I know that’s what they do because I’m pretty good at knowing when to walk on the stage. But it was both frightening to give up that control and kind of comforting to be taken care of in that way.

One thing that’s important to think about in your online performing arts education is that there are many differences between designing costume for film and designing for the theater, the opera, or music. “I think the biggest difference is that in theater, you see the whole costume, you see the whole person, and you see actors all together,” says Durinda Wood. “Shoes are also really important because they are usually in the audience’s eye line.”

Durinda explains how background design affects designing costumes for the theater: “The background is very stationary. You know exactly what that background’s going to be. … Artistically, it’s much easier to design for theater and opera and know that your vision is going to be the way that you designed it.”

“I love theater and opera. I always thought that I would be a theater designer,” Durinda says. She notes that “one thing about the opera is that the singers are just singers. They’re not necessarily actors. And they’re much less demanding, I would say, about their costumes. I think they really just want to be able to sing. That’s their most important thing.” She adds that sometimes simple changes are called for, like loosening a collar or vest to allow an opera singer enough room to vocalize comfortably.

If you consider a career in costume design as you pursue your performing arts education, it’s nice to know that Durinda also says she’s found that both opera singers and theater actors enjoy working with costume designers and treat them with respect.

In the world of performing arts, there are multiple different categories, or “buckets,” of theatrical performances. We have a canon of work in which the plays are performed in what would be known as elevated language. In this bucket, you could put the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe. You could also put in the restoration comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. You could even put in latter-day 20th-century verse plays by playwrights like Maxwell Anderson.

When it rhymes, or when the language is particularly poetic or unusual, that would certainly be one canon. And Shakespeare, for one, is still among the most frequently produced playwrights across the United States. Here in New York, we have the New York Shakespeare Festival in the public theaters that still remain committed to classical work. So that covers the first bucket.

There is also another bucket, which consists of new playwriting—plays that have not been produced previously in a professional context. Oftentimes, these plays can be written in everyday conversational language. However, of course, the language of these plays varies enormously from context to context and playwright to playwright.

For example, an Irish playwright like Seán O’Casey or a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh would be writing in an Irish dialect, but they’re also experimenting with form enormously. So you could have a black comedy, you could have elements of horror in what is a conversational text-based play. As you can see, it gets harder and harder to actually come up with the different bucket labels for genres.

Playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, of course, represent a form of 19th-century naturalism, which was all about character and closely observed character. Now, certain American directors are approaching that work and staging the context in which those plays appear so that we will either discover them anew or see them differently.

Spectacle theater is represented, in some cases, by the Greeks although it is certainly possible to do an intimate production of a Greek play. There has been a tremendous interest, particularly in the last 20 years, in physical theater, in which the movement is certainly as important, or perhaps even more important, than the words.

You can learn much more about the history of theater and the many different forms it takes by exploring online performing arts education. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits and lessons of performing arts education from the comfort of your own home.