Staging Articles for Drama Teachers

Theatre teachers are often faced with staging productions in less-than-optimal spaces. Whether it’s on a platform in the corner of a classroom or the stage in the cafeteria, theatre teachers have...

It’s a struggle to stage a production with little or no funds, but it’s not impossible! If your program is new or small, chances are you’re dealing with a tight budget. So how do you stage a show...

Blocking is fundamental to acting. Whether staging a two-person scene or 30-person musical number, how you arrange the actors onstage is an important part of the storytelling. Unfortunately,...

It’s always exciting to have action-packed sequences in your show, and chase scenes are both great fun and challenging to stage. Whether a character is being chased by a villain, chasing after a...

The visual of blood onstage creates an immediate visceral reaction for audience members — it evokes feelings of fear, pain, injury, life and death. But using fake blood onstage can be challenging,...

Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz are just some of the wonderful stories featuring characters that can fly. Many great plays feature flying sequences, but how do we stage those...

Eating and drinking are necessary for existence on this planet. So much of our life is centred around food: making it together, serving it for a special occasion, trying new dishes, challenges...

When students are presenting scenes in drama class, the most typical setup is actors on one side of the room with the audience facing them on the opposite side, like a typical proscenium arch...

It’s exciting when well-known books, films, and television shows get turned into stage productions. Plays and musicals like The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The SpongeBob Musical,...

You need your students to work independently on a scene but when it’s time to present they seem to have forgotten everything you’ve taught them. Scene Self-Staging: Teaching Students to Block...

In theatre, a transition refers to the process of moving from one scene or set to the next. It seems simple enough–grab “all the stuff” at the end of one scene and take it offstage, while the rest...

Different venues can have a huge effect on a production. They can create beautiful and intriguing staging options for directors and designers, and really surprise and enchant audiences. They can...

Teachers, when working in rehearsals with your students, are you more of a planner type or a go-with-the-flow type? Do you map out all the blocking and movements in advance, or do you allow...

When directing a show, it can be very useful to “pre-block” a scene ahead of time. “Pre-blocking” means to plan all basic character movements in advance of the rehearsal. This can save a lot of...

It happens all the time in young or beginning actors. You’re sitting in the audience and out of the corner of your eye you catch it – an actor starts to shift back and forth on their feet. Their...

The show I’ve been doing this summer is staged in the round. Well, the audience is arranged in a more square-like pattern, but “in the round” will suffice for our purposes. There aren’t many...

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