Educational Event:
The Stage Manager’s Role in Building an Equitable and Compassionate Production Culture
The webinar will focus on tools that enable stage managers to build an equitable and compassionate workspace and will promote transparency, equity and inclusion as community-wide practices that can be exercised by everyone involved in a production. Alcorn and Porter will discuss how to effectively collaborate with producers, general managers and anyone who holds positional authority within an organization. They will speak from their social identities, mid-career women—one Black, and one White—who are educators and stage managers, spouses, parents and leaders in the field of stage management.
About the Presenters
Professor Narda E. Alcorn (she, her, hers), Chair, Stage Management, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, and Professor Lisa Porter (she, her, hers), Professor, Head of Stage Management, UC San Diego, published their first book, Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach, in January 2020. The book has been featured in multiple publications and they have visited more than 50 virtual spaces in the past two years to teach and present their work.
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Over the summer of 2020, Professors Alcorn and Porter co-authored the HowlRound essay We Commit to Anti-Racist Stage Management Education. This essay sparked a conversation about anti-racist stage management practices that continues on the HowlRound platform with the recent work by a collective of the next generation of stage managers: Hold, Please: Addressing Urgency and Other White Supremacist Standards in Stage Management.
Alcorn and Porter are honored to be cited in the American Theatre article Pushing Past Norms and Into Equitable Authenticity: how TGNC production and stage managers are leading the field by example, co-authored by UC San Diego MFA Stage Management Alumni Kasson Marroquin.
Other press features include the American Theatre article Managing the Stage, and Managing Expectations and on the USITT podcast, TECHnically Speaking: A Conversation on Anti-Racist Stage Management, and A Call to Diversify Those Calling the Cues, NY Times, July 5, 2021.
Professors Alcorn and Porter have been stage managers since high school and met at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University in 1992.