Welcome back to another installment of Show Production 101! Let’s talk about time management because it is hard and many of us are terrible at it. This was a doozy of a post to write so settle in!
Your production timeline may vary wildly from show to show, depending on things like necessity (was this show commissioned and did they give you two months to put it together? Cool, cool, cool.) and what type of show you’re doing. If you missed the inaugural post on ‘What Type of Show are You?’ You can go back and read that here.
For this installment I’m focusing on creating a timeline for Narrative Shows, which I’m defining as any show that is mostly created from whole cloth to stand as a cohesive unit. Think Quidam vs. a Halloween cabaret. Why? Narrative shows far and away require the most planning and generally have much longer timelines. You can easily adapt a Narrative timeline to suit your cabaret show.
Again, for the purposes of this series, I’m going to use the words ‘producer’ and ‘director’ interchangeably. If you’re reading this, I think it’s safe to assume that you’ll be wearing both (and possibly more) hats, and probably don’t have that Hollywood dough to differentiate between roles.
As a bonus for reading through all the way, you’ll be able to find a sample timeline that you can download and modify as you see fit!
What elements does a show timeline include?
Creating a timeline is all well and good, but first let’s define the stages of production that need to happen before we decide how long to spend on each of them:
Research and Dreaming: The ‘I think I want to do a show’ phase. This is where you, the director alone (or possibly with a trusted companion or co-producer) will start thinking about, and planning, the outlines of a show. This might include an actual show outline, venue research, etc.
Pre-Production: This is where you’ll put together, drum-roll please, a timeline! In this phase you might also be casting, deciding on rehearsal times, and other behind the scenes work that will need to happen before you’re responsible for a bunch of artists.
Casting and Solidifying: Like the name implies, this is where you cast your show, and solidify your outline based on the artists you’re actually going to work with. If your show requires a script, you should probably be finishing at least a rough draft. If you’re writing choreo start getting some ideas for eight counts on paper.
Group Brainstorm: You’ve got your artists together (finally!) and it’s time to make some magic—aka circus—happen! Play with ideas and choreography as a group and see what grows.
Choreography: Choreography is where you’re going to take all of the ideas you’ve generated and turn them into acts and scenes that you can rehearse.
Rehearsal: Technically everything from Group Brainstorm on is rehearsal, but in the Rehearsal period you’re coming in, practicing what you’ve written, memorizing it, and making tweaks.
Running: Running your show. Figuring out your logistics and transitions. Putting the polish on it.
Marketing and Ticketing: The part where you advertise and actually sell your show.
Because this phase is quite a behemoth and will run concurrently to several of your other phases, we’ll actually be discussing this in its own write up, but don’t forget about it when you’re making a timeline!
Performance: Maybe your show happens on one day, maybe you’ve set up a tour. This is where you get to reap the work you’ve done!
Let’s make a timeline!
There is a lot of potential for variation in a timeline especially when considering factors like ‘have you done this before?’ and ‘how complex is this show?’
Writing a narrative show also tends to be an iterative process, which is to say it’s filled with trial and error, and you’ll be refining your work along the way. Our script for Layovers, for instance, has undergone at least five different series of major edits, and with each of those edits, or iterations, usually comes a cascading series of changes to things like choreo and cues.
Don’t let this freak you out. While it’s crucial to have a timeline and an idea of where you’re going, trusting your process and letting yourself be flexible when you can afford to will make your show a much stronger final product.
RESEARCH AND DREAMING:
You could spend an infinite amount of time in this phase, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. This is, in fact, the only phase of show creation that allows you to do such a thing.
Maybe you have a ton of research to do, maybe you want to draft a script and solid choreography ideas. There’s no harm in taking your time in this stage. Maybe ideas come quickly to you—in that case, get them down on paper, and then let them sit for a while before committing to them. First thought doesn’t equal best thought.
Some things you want to accomplish in this phase:
– Brainstorm ideas/themes/stories for your show.
– Think about how you can portray these on stage – do you need a script? What about tech?
– Outline a sample of your show, in a list of acts or scenes.
– Think about how you want to cast this show — how many artists do you need? How many of them need to be multidisciplinary?
– Research venues. You might even, at this point, depending on how committed you are, ask a venue to pencil in a date as some venues book at least a year out. This will also help you get a more concrete sense of what your timeline will need to be.
– Research insurance if you don’t already have it! This part is non-negotiable and there will be a whole installment on this.
– Research rehearsal space if you don’t already have one. Maybe your local circus school will let you rehearse in off hours for a nominal fee, or in exchange for workshops.
PRE-PRODUCTION:
Now is when it’s time to start putting together an actionable plan for creating a show, including making a timeline. In service to your timeline, (and making sure your artists know what they’re signing on for) you’ll also want to start solidifying your rehearsal times. Knowing whether you’re going to be rehearsing two hours once a week for six months, or eight hours a day for one month is critically important information.
Some things you want to accomplish in this phase:
– Write a rough draft of your timeline from here on out. This will help you see concretely exactly how much time you have (in hours, even) to create a show, and can inform how much time you have to spend in the rest of the phases.
– Write or post your call for artists, if you’re having one. Include the timeline and your basic expectations for commitment. The more concrete information you give people, the more you will all be on the same page.
– Have auditions or go over digital submissions.
– Cast your show!
– Write and send performer contracts.
– Finishing writing scaffolding (a script, choreography ideas) to build your show around.
GROUP BRAINSTORM:
Except in very specific cases, most shows will include a group brainstorm phase. This is the period of time that is the most exciting for both directors and artists. You’re all in the same space together! Anything is possible! You have so much time. You have so much time that you can definitely learn all these new skills or invent an apparatus and learn it.
If you don’t already see what I’m getting at here—the group brainstorm phase, while often the most exciting one, is also the most dangerous phase for independent circus shows. If you don’t have a timeline to keep you on track for the creation of your show, and even worse, if you do but you don’t stick to it, it can completely derail your show in the later stages.
Use the timeline you made to guide you and help contextualize the work you’re doing on a larger scale. Maybe you really want to include a three high, or some other big and scary acro trick that needs spotters, or you have an idea for a really intricate eight count, but it’s going to take a long time to learn.
If each hour is a resource buck, how many of those resource bucks can you afford to devote to a single skill or moment? For instances like this it can be really helpful to set deadlines and look at your rehearsal time not in terms of weeks or months that you have to work together, but in hours.
For example, in the show I’m currently working on (shout out to LAYOVERS!) we had a period of time where we were brainstorming things to do with folding chairs. I suggested we try foot-to-foot with the base on one of the chairs. It was a great idea. It totally worked. It is also very nerve wracking and a trick with a high potential for catastrophic failure which means, that as the flyer, I really only wanted to practice it with a spot.
Our show has three people, and it takes three people to execute the trick. This meant that the scary trick that needs to be super solid kept falling by the wayside if my preferred spotter didn’t happen to be in the studio. In the end, we decided to set a deadline for being able to comfortably perform the skill without a spot. We ended up meeting the deadline, and the trick got to stay.
This is the number one place where shows fall apart. I’ve been privy to shows that didn’t keep their master timeline in mind and stayed in the brainstorm phase when they should be in the Choreography, or even Running phases, which compounds stress down the line. I’ve been in shows that didn’t have a firm timeline for production and spent years in rehearsal without ever making it out of the brainstorm phase. Both instances were frustrating and disappointing for everyone involved.
Maybe your group brainstorm isn’t yielding the fruits that you want as you near Choreography, and that’s okay. Take this opportunity to simplify and juice up the areas where you’re doing well.
The number one piece of advice that I give to my students writing acts applies here as well: it’s always better to do a simple thing well than a more complicated thing poorly.
Some things you want to accomplish in this phase:
– Group introductions.
– Set your expectations. These can be behavioral (maybe you’re working with kids and/or cats), artistic expectations, as well as what the cast can expect from you. Those contracts you wrote? Now is a good time to go over them, as well as to open the floor for questions. This part is so, so important especially if you’re working with new artists, or a new group of people.
– Go over the timeline with the cast. Is the timeline for writing solos different from group acts? Make sure everyone knows when each thing needs to be done.*
– Start putting out prompts, playing improv games, and building off of eight counts. Try skills. Throw all that spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks.
– Video everything. Take time on your own after rehearsals to see what has potential and should keep being excavated, and what doesn’t look as mind blowing as you thought.
*I find it most helpful if everything you expect people to remember (ie: expectations, timelines, and deadlines) is printed out for them. If you have physically handed someone a copy of these things and gone over them it’s a lot harder for folks to forget them, or to claim ignorance.
CHOREOGRAPHY:
It’s time to wrangle all of your material into something show shaped! If you’ve never written choreography before this task can be extremely daunting, and it can often be good to work with a partner or assistant, whom you can bounce ideas off of. Grab a cast member who seemed especially eager to contribute, or a buddy with a dance background and get cooking. If you’re flying solo, I have faith in you.
There are many ways to write choreography. Folks from a dance background tend to prefer doing things in eight counts, but do whatever works. (As someone not coming from a dance background, I don’t usually use eight counts as the basis of my choreo unless I’m specifically writing dance movements.)
My preferred style is to make lists for each act of everything that worked in brainstorm (you might also have sub-lists of filler skills, or just general things you know people can do—aka cartwheels—and then start plugging skills into passes.
If you can get your choreo or blocking into some sort of written form for your artists, that can be extremely helpful. For acts with a lot of movement around the stage, laying things out from a bird’s eye view has worked well for me before.
Some things you want to accomplish in this phase:
– Writing choreo, obviously.
– Continuing solo research to flesh out empty spots etc.
– Checking in with your artists about their solos—find out what they need from you to feel supported.
Presenting choreography:
I like to present choreography in small bites. Learning choreography can be overwhelming for many folks especially if it’s not something they have a background in.
Generally, I try to teach no more than a few eight counts, or up to ~30 seconds at a time. If you ask your cast to learn a complex act right from the jump, it can backfire, and cause people shut down. Teaching choreography in small chunks also gives you more time to develop your choreography. It allows you to build off of what you’ve presented and change your mind as you go.
If your cast has multiple acts to learn, I find the following format to be helpful:
Rehearsal One:
Act 1 – learn new material
Act 2 – discuss ideas, review relevant skills for next rehearsal
Rehearsal Two:
Act 1 – Review choreography, discuss ideas and review relevant skills
Act 2 – Learn new material
And so on and so forth. Especially if your cast is only meeting once a week, make sure you review anything they’ve learned in the last rehearsal otherwise they will forget it.
REHEARSAL:
You’ve written choreography for your pieces, now it’s time to practice. This phase is pretty straightforward. Usually when I’m structuring rehearsals at this stage, I like to chunk them up by fifteen to thirty minutes for each piece. This allows time to warm up any skills or sections of choreography that you need to get comfortable with before trying to run a piece in its entirety.
Even in the early stages of running a piece I tend to use a mixture of running without and with the music. Realistically some choreography might need to change during this stage. Running it occasionally with the music even before a piece is tight will give you an idea of how well everything will match up once things are smoother. Maybe you’ll need to take some things out, maybe you’ll need to back fill a bit.
Some things you want to accomplish during this phase:
– Filming run throughs to get an idea of what’s working and what’s not.
– Scheduling viewings or getting videos of individual acts and solos. Giving act feedback.
– Take note of anything you think is missing from your show.
– Brainstorming and writing transitions, if you haven’t.
– Putting feelers out for any tech folks, stagehands, or backstage helpers you might need.
RUNNING:
It’s time to put all the pieces together! Once you start running your show you’ll start to see where any cracks are. This is normal; don’t panic. No matter how much planning you’ve done some things will play differently once you’re no longer practicing them in isolation.
Maybe someone doesn’t have enough time to transition from one costume to another, maybe someone has to deliver lines right after an intense Chinese pole solo, maybe that one rigging transition is painfully long. All of these are things that I’ve personally encountered, and all of them are fixable. Sometimes you can move the pieces around, and sometimes you have a cult member bring a novelty dragon shaped sippy cup out to your pole artist on a literal silver platter so they can take a beat before delivering their big villain monologue. (Yes, it ended up being my very favorite part of this show.)
Depending on how much time you have to do run throughs before your show goes up you may want to do a quick notes session after each run, or you may want to take your footage home and watch it in private to deliver specific notes.
The format we’re using for running LAYOVERS right now looks like this:
Run A: Stumble through, do notes
Run B: Smooth run, take longer notes at home
Run C: Something in-between a stumble and a smooth run, quick notes during the run, discussion after
Run D: Smooth Run, take longer notes at home
We’ve run the show before, but we’re in that phase where we’re really trying to hammer out the kinks, so now that we know the show (and our lines!) it’s important to take the time to highlight those sticky moments as we encounter them.
If you have the luxury of multiple rehearsals per week, making one day a run-through day and the other a ‘fixing problems and general rehearsal day’ is a great option.
As you get closer to the show date, I highly recommend getting an outside eye on your show, especially if you are pulling double duty as a director and performer. Two modes of outside eye that I like (both of which we’ve used for LAYOVERS) is a solo outside eye, and a soft preview. If you are getting an outside eye on your show, make sure that you’re doing so early enough that you can implement any big changes you might end up making.
For our solo outside eye, I invited a great friend who is also a director, and who I knew I could count on for honest, thoughtful, feedback for a private viewing. She watched our show, I took new headshots for her, everyone got ice cream (literally). Use your creative network as an opportunity to give and get some mutual aid.
For our soft preview, we invited a mix of eight wonderful humans to come view our show. One was a teenager, one was a theater professional with no ties to circus, one was a theater professional who is a recreational circus student, etc. We’ve done two previews for LAYOVERS and both times we tried to hit the following check boxes with our viewers:
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Circus professional
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Circus enthusiast
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Theater professional
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General audience member
Make sure you get a good mix of people in there so that the opinions you’re hearing are varied. Some of the opinions might even cancel each other out, and you get to remember that everyone brings their own perspective to everything. You might disagree with some of the feedback and that’s also totally fine. As the director you know your show best, but now you have different lenses with which to view it.
Some things you want to accomplish during this phase:
– Getting other eyes on your show, either through a trusted outside source, or some sort of soft preview
– Writing cues
– Gathering your props and costumes
PERFORMANCE:
You’ve prepped yourself and your artists as best you can and now it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Some things you’ll find helpful in this phase:
– Packing lists (I’ve learned this the hard way).
– A schedule for your theater time to keep you on track.
– Find your door people, do you have a backstage manager?
– Snacks. Always snacks.
As promised at the top of this post, here is a sample timeline spreadsheet. If you’d like to use it, either download it, or make a copy in google and get to editing!
Thanks for being here.
xoxo
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