Breaching the Fourth Wall

Stage management is ultimately about the clear communication of important information to a wide range of people. One of the ways a stage manager facilitates her job is to assemble a callboard, a bulletin board of pertinent information for anyone involved with the show. It includes the staples like rehearsal schedules and emergency information, but also has useful lists like local restaurants that deliver and the nearest acupuncturist. The stage manager maintains the board throughout rehearsals and the run of the show, always insuring that it is updated and organized. Nothing is more satisfying than stepping away from a beautiful mosaic of brochures, printouts, and pushpins perfectly aligned, knowing no one can ever plead ignorance when al pertinent information is cleanly displayed.

With my history of stage management, it is little surprise that I was swept off my feet when I was introduced to the callboard’s digital sibling, Pageflakes. Finally, a site that allows me to organize my frequently visited websites and resources in one place! My excitement nearly rivaled its level at the release of Sharpie’s silver colored marker.

The additions to my Pageflakes began with RSS feeds, allowing me to view headlines from sites I regularly visit on one page. I began to think about which sites I regularly visit for general theater news, and added the first flake to my page, the theatre section of the New York Times. As someone who grew up living thirty miles outside of the Big Apple, I might be a bit biased about the importance of the publication, but as the home of Ben Brantley’s reviews and any updates about the Great White Way, it is a must read for anyone in the industry. Soon to follow was Playbill.com, made famous by its Broadway programs, which covers theater news on a national scale. Honing in on the technical side of theatre and live events, Live Design quickly became a flake as well. Live Design is the live production standard for news on notable designers, projects, and product releases.

Deviating away from general theater and live entertainment production news, I also found a series of blogs about arts administration, their issues, and how those issues affect productions as whole. Using an anything flake, I quickly created another RSS subheading for arts admin and added Theatre and Entertainment Law, Butts in the Seats, Arts Marketing, and Ghost Light.

My last column of RSS feeds is dedicated to the other primary type of live events in the entertainment visit: concerts. Just as much work for production folks comes from live concerts as from straight theatre, and it is a sector of live entertainment that one would be foolish to ignore. As such, I’ve included three major news sources for live musical acts: Pollstar, the Mix, and Live Music Blog. All three, especially Pollstar, are bibles of information checked by artists, promoters, producers, and venues alike.

Having added RSS feeds of my most frequented sites to one page, I created another page for searches and bookmarks. A search of Pageflakes and blogs is preloaded on this page to search for a number of tags related to live event production. Adding to the convenience of having all of my information in one place, I also uploaded my Diigo bookmarks into its own flake.

As if my own bookmarks weren’t enough, my social bookmarking soul mate’s bookmarks also make an appearance in my Pageflakes. My soul mate is UTTheatre, a production aficionado from Tennessee. Although there are no unique gems among his bookmarks, he’s developed a comprehensive index of online sites related to theatre technology including manufacturers websites, user product reviews, rental houses, and humor. Tapping into UTTheatre’s bookmarks and adding them to my Pageflakes saved me thee effort of compiling these sites myself.

As a fun little addition to the search/bookmarks page, I also added a photo box which features images tagged stage, concert, or performance. Much of live entertainment is about composition and design, and viewing photos of different performances can only help to inspire.

Though RSS feeds, bookmarks, and pageflakes stirred the organizational excitement of the part of me that stage manages, an online tool called Zotero created the same reaction in my inner student. Designed to help keep track of online resources (and generate bibliographies!), it prevents a lot of the backtracking that occur in online research. My final Pageflakes page is dedicated to the resources I found and then tracked using Zotero. My favorite find was an archive of videotaped theatrical productions, called Theatre in Video. Most research materials for theatre either are text-based or in the form of an overpriced ticket. Theatre in Video is a comprehensive online alternative to Lincoln Center’s video archives, which need to be viewed at their facility in New York. On the complete other end of the spectrum, I found full ebook on the implementation of theatrical technology in Shakespearean England. Too cool! On a slightly less optimistic note, the final two articles included on my Pageflake, “Theatre Education” and “Theatre in American Higher Education” both discuss the state of undergraduate theatrical education and what steps administrators need to take in order to improve their programs.

The content of my Pageflakes is about as varied as the ways in which I am involved in live entertainment. These sites are important to the student and the practitioner that I am and hope to continue to be. For the moment, I’ll be content to the step back and admire the ability of an online site to aid me in streamlining the information I view online most frequently, and I don’t doubt that my Pageflakes will see additions in the months to come.