The Most Frequently Asked Question:  “What should I have in my portfolio?”

Your stage management portfolio should showcase your theatrical, organizational, and leadership abilities. Whether you've stage managed a full scale musical or coordinated volunteers for a church festival both require good management skills; your task is to represent these skills in a portable, physical form, i.e. the portfolio. So how do you do this?

The overall organization of the portfolio is almost as critical as its contents. Is the portfolio neat, organized, and representational of your work? Are items included critical or "filler"? We'd rather see a short portfolio with a few key documents than a large one with items that don't represent your stage management potential. You do not need to transport an entire production book to the interview, a condensed portfolio containing the following items is sufficient:

• Show related paperwork such as contact sheets, calendars, daily schedules and reports
• Crew running paperwork - choose your most complicated show
  • Shift plots
  • Prop lists
  • Wardrobe quick change tracking
  • Etc.
• Samples of blocking and cueing - bring samples from multiple shows if possible
• Any other documents that you created that helped you organize and run the show

You may include a program for each production to provide statistics on size of cast, crew, and orchestra. Photographs are also beneficial but only to represent scope and scale of the production. Although pictures of you building/painting the set can be interesting they don't really represent your stage management potential so please do not include them.

If you have no formal theatrical experience please include documentation of events that you've coordinated. Even if these are simply your notes on how you organized the event this helps the committee see how you think through a project. Whether your portfolio contains items from a production or an outside event you may want to include a brief description of each item, e.g. to describe a notation on a blocking page you may say "This production was staged in the round so we had no formal "upstage" or "downstage". To help define the space to record the blocking I used the face of a clock. Twelve o'clock was upstage center which we chose to be the center of the north wall of the theatre..." A brief description like this helps the committee understand your choices and can promote discussion during the interview.

Remember, the porfolio represents who you are, what you know, and what you've experienced up until today. All of these things will continue to evolve and grow throughout your experience in college and then into the profession.

If you have any questions regarding your portfolio, interview, or application process please do not hesitate to contact me. I look forward to meeting you.

Michele Kay , Assistant Professor
Stage Management
College-Conservatory of Music
University of Cincinnati
michele.kay@uc.edu
(513) 556-9440

(Revised 10/18/08)

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