Technical
“To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.”
― Nawal El Saadawi
Every live performer has experienced the dreaded technical rehearsal, or worse, an entire “tech” week. If you aren’t familiar, it’s the unavoidable marriage of art and science every stage production waits as long as humanly possible to go through. It’s typically the last thing done before performances begin for real audiences — the moment when actors get on the actual stage, see the costumes, sets, lighting, and hear the sounds of the production all come together for the first time. It’s magical. For the first ten minutes.
The rest of “tech” almost always a slog. The performers, having focused on perfectly crafting “the art” for the last several weeks or months, are forced to sit, stand, gesticulate, and caterwaul in perfect precision, over and over again for hours and days, all so the lighting, sound, sets, and technical queues can be precisely tuned to turn a bunch of wheezing meat bags flopping around onstage into a multimedia extravaganza worthy of critical acclaim.
No one involved enjoys this experience. No one. It’s possible the director does, but only if they’re a sadist.
The actors are bored. The designers are frustrated at how wrong everything is. The technicians are annoyed the actors aren’t paying attention and the sets don’t look anything like the dioramas. The stage crew just wants to go home on time. You‘ll almost always hear whispering throughout the process, and it’s almost always a cruel joke or a breathless curse.
Why do we put ourselves through this torture, every time? I’ve heard a lot of excuses. “The technology would be a distraction for the actors as they find their characters.” “It doesn’t make sense to light the stage until you know where people will be standing.” “We haven’t even written the song yet. Why would we consider the acoustics of the building?”
It’s all bullshit.
Yes, there are orders of operations and practicalities to observe. You can’t stand on a stage until it’s built. But so many of the dependencies we treat as immutable are more flexible than we give them credit. As a performer, I’ve never been thrown off by seeing set designs or lighting plans early in rehearsals. If anything, I’ve only benefited from getting “early” access to the designs the rest of the production team were working on because I was able to better contextualize the role I was playing in the world we were creating separately, but together.
While I was studying acting in college, my evening job was working in the lighting department. I would show up a few days a week, in between classes and rehearsals, to help rig lights, replace bulbs, mop floors, and dangle hundreds of feet in the air in the service of making performers look their best onstage. I was often responsible for hanging lights for shows I was performing and even starring in, so I got to see both sides of a stage production. The art and the science.
Tabloids like to sensationalize performers and make them all look like entitled divas. Stories about big ticket actors and singers yelling at cast and crew members are commonplace. There have been many, many people who have lived up to this description. My experience, both in school and in my days attempting a performing career in New York, was that most performers are kind, thoughtful, and observant humans. They get to know their production crew almost as well as the rest of the cast. They’re patient and willing to learn about someone else’s job. Every conversation could be experiential fodder to play a role more authentically in the future.
Similarly, production team members are unsung heroes, who typically spend as much time, if not more, honing and perfecting their craft as performers do. Production design degree programs are expensive, arduous, and competitive. I’ve met hundreds of people who work in set, sound, lighting, and stage management, and every one of them has been kind, generous, creative, and wholly committed to make a production the best it can be.
Everyone on both sides sounds great, don’t they? So why do we choose to work in silos for months on end, only to make ourselves miserable, cursing at each other under our breaths, for a week when we’re all under incredible pressure to get things ready for a real audience? Art isn’t science, they tell me. Science isn’t art, they say.
What I learned as an actor getting paid to hang lights is that big productions have lots of moving pieces, and the more I knew about everyone else’s job, the more effective I could be at mine. Even better, I could actually help during tech rehearsals instead of standing around like a listless marionette waiting for my moment in the artificial sun.
We have this problem in product development, too. We talk a lot about silos and how pernicious they are, and yet we still create them, over and over again. Even with the best of intentions, we so often choose to throw work over the wall at each other and end up resenting each other for it.
“Devs don’t need to do UX research to write effective code.” “Designers don’t need to understand how the software works, only the problems it solves.” “Product managers don’t need to understand release mechanics to improve engagement.”
Sound familiar?
As a professional product manager, I sometimes, though less often than I used to, get physically angry when I hear people talk about “technical” product managers and whether or not it’s important to be one. From my perspective, the technology is part of the production. I can make better product decisions if I understand the trade-offs I’m asking my peer designers, engineers, and the people who use our products to make. Just like a performance production team, we all need to work together at some point, and waiting until just before we launch will always be more painful than it needs to be.
There are divas in the software world, too. I’ve been one. There are many, many more excellent people who have spent years or decades honing their specific craft. We’re better when we work together. Our products are better when we work together.
You can test my assertion out for yourself tomorrow. Pick one person who you pass work to on a regular basis. Try sitting with them, asking how they do their job, and even trying to do what they do. I’ll bet you it’s more difficult than it looks, and you’ll get better at your job by learning more about theirs. Maybe you’ll even make a friend.
You don’t have to be technical to make tech less painful. You need to be more engaged with your peers and their part of the work. A little bit goes an incredibly long way.
Why wait?
