Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020 - 12

Prior to the global pandemic, international tours, multinational casts, and
even globalized entertainment companies were seeing unprecedented growth.
While touring is presently curtailed, we
should nevertheless prepare student
stage managers for when international collaborations resume. The Stage
Managers' Association in the United
States has started an International
Cohort to foster such exchanges.
Educational programs can respond by
offering world language and cultural
competence courses. While tours will
often hire local translators, cultural practices and expectations are not as easily

an organization's diversity, equity, and
inclusion statements and how to work
with intimacy directors and consultants
to reduce the risk of a production causing
trauma for any of its participants. Stage
managers are called upon to practice interpersonal skills and strengthen teams,
but they first need to study ethical practices before they can apply them.
Finally, there are the vocational
courses on skillsets that stage managers use daily. First aid is a must, but also
safety courses including training ranging
from OSHA requirements to emergency
crowd control to response protocols for
terrorist attacks. Apprenticeships can

Within the SM2030 Project,
participants were asked to identify
their biggest concerns as they
started their careers in stage
management. The troubling answers
were the 38 percent who expressed
concerns about pay levels and the
additional 8 percent who listed
burnout as a concern.
translated, and language proficiency can
inspire confidence in the stage manager
leading a multi-national team. Language
skills can also assist in broadening career
options in opera and ballet. In the 2019
survey, 18 percent of stage managers
reported having managed an opera and
117 participants reported having worked
on a AGMA contract, but how many college stage management programs teach
opera?
Academic institutions also need to
provide courses on ethical management
in the creative industries. How can stage
managers provide a " brave space " (Arao
and Clemens 2013) for the entire team
(and themselves), whether in a union
or non-union setting? Stage managers
need to study the power dynamics in
the creative process and how the
#notinourhouse and #metoo movements
have changed the collaborative process.
Stage managers must know how to apply

12 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | FALL 2020

offer production-specific training, but
educational programs can offer career
guidance with union policies, taxes,
and medical plans. In this way, students
will feel better equipped for the profession they have been pursuing since high
school.

Challenge #3: Adjust Course and
Program Size to Meet Supply and
Demand

Higher education's unit of measurement
is the course; whether online or in the
classroom, universities require courses
to survive. In fact, courses are not considered " viable " until they have a sufficient
number of students, sometimes as low as
six or nine at expensive private schools
but often 12 or 15 or even 18 students
on larger campuses. College instructors
have found workarounds to teach these
larger groups, but is it truly the best
way to study stage management? Most

colleges require productions to augment
courses, but do they have the staff to treat
these productions as labs where the instructor visits each rehearsal each day
rather than delay observations until technical rehearsals? Moreover, these large
classes often reduce individual responsibility as stage management teams, and
crews in general are several times larger
than their professional equivalents. In
the SM2030 Project group, 56 percent
of students who are pursuing careers in
stage management had called cues in
three or fewer academic productions at
the end of their college education. Are we
supplying enough quality learning opportunities given the demand?
Issues of supply and demand also
impact how the growing number of undergraduate stage management programs are impacting the profession.
The number of graduate programs have
remained relatively stable and, based on
the directory of programs that recruit
through URTA, most traditionally limit
enrollment to fewer than five students
each year (URTA 2019). These limitations in programs and program enrollment are not found in undergraduate
stage management education. If there
are approximately 5,000 working stage
managers between the ages of 21 and
71, as extrapolated from work week data
from Actors' Equity Association, and if
the goal of the career-focused programs
is to provide a steady progression of
stage managers over those 50 years, then
all of these programs should collectively
graduate approximately 100 new stage
managers into the workforce each year.
These are rough estimates because we
know not all people who identify as stage
managers are paid as stage managers.
Academic institutions are annually
producing an incredible surplus of students who believe they will work in the
field and, like the oversupply of new actors graduating each year, this surplus
can drive down wages, hinder efforts
to reduce work hours, and cause stage
managers in the prime of their careers
to consider other professions (McGraw
and Patterson 2020, Figure 64). It is one
thing to offer degrees in broad fields such
as Biology or English that include dozens
of career paths that result in jobs in communities across the United States. But if
we are offering single-career-focused degrees, often further specialized to one or

Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020

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