i miss theatre
THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING THEATER
Ricardo Abad
“All the world’s a stage,” says Shakespeare, “and all the men and women merely players.” If Shakespeare is right, then the best among us are those with a knack for performing. These are the women and men who have an edge over others because they’ve also got the talent to impress a client, unite a group, strike a deal, inspire a team, host an event, and think on one’s feet. It’s a set of special qualities many companies desire in their work force.
I’ve been an adviser of a school theater company for twenty years. Each year I train students to act and direct and also oversee their work in production and marketing. The majority of these students do not become professional theater artists. They instead pursue careers in management, advertising, law, medicine, media, social development, computer technology, and the academe. Some, bless them, even enter the religious life.
Has their theater experience helped them in professional lives? I e-mailed the graduates and asked them that question. Their unanimous answer was a resounding yes: theater helped them shine in their jobs. I sum up their replies in five statements:
Theater people have superb presentation skills.
The advertising giant Antonio Mercado preferred to hire applicants with theater backgrounds in his ad firm These applicants, he reasoned, have the personality and the panache to sell an ad campaign to clients. This power to persuade also makes theater people ideal trainors. Ron Capinding, star of many Shakespeare plays, is a teacher who also he is frequently asked to train batches of aspiring actors in a major network every summer. Joseph dela Cruz is another teacher who doubles up as a trainor of the famous Seven Habits workshop. Voltaire Gonzales joined the marketing staff a major car company after college, and found his position rise when he displayed his skills as a trainor. He is now a licensed regional instructor for the multinational company.
What makes theater artists gifted trainors? Carelle Mangaliag was once a training director and unit manager of a major insurance firm. Her theater life, she said, helped her company to boost sales:
“Theater helped me to do my work with passion. And infect people with it,” she said. “I teach insurance people how to sell, how to make sales calls, overcome call reluctance, reach quotas, and make a difference in people’s lives. Theater helped me to do my work with passion. And infect people with it. I go straight to the gut in motivating people. The result: my agency grew 248% because everyone at work felt good about themselves.”
Even lawyers like Eboy Paez found his bag of presentation skills useful in court. Beyond stage eloquence, he found his theater improvisation exercises vital:
“On more than one occasion, I’ve convinced judges to grant me a postponement by coughing and acting ill. And I can never say enough about the art of adlibbing -or thinking on your feet -- that has prepared me to be on the ball when arguing in court.”
Devi Ignacio-Paez, Eboy’s spouse and former co-star, became a high school English teacher and also knows the value of being on your toes.
”When the intended lesson plan would fall apart in one class when it worked perfectly just the other day in another class, then there was a need to shift styles and speech and approach without skipping a beat so as not to waste time nor to leave the class bored and fidgety in their seats. Theater work helped me ride through the shift, and stay poised, not panicky or flustered.”
Even laid back fiction writers like Peter Mayshle drew on memories of a physical theater when asked to read passages from a new novel in front of an audience. Peter said he almost instinctively adapted an open stance and a relaxed posture, adding:
“I was also conscious of voice projection as it was a fairly large space and people were sort of scattered everywhere, and the whole theater training made me more confident I guess which I otherwise wouldn’t have had.“
I once asked Rolando S. Tinio what he sought the most in actors. “Generosity,” he said.
It’s the same sense of generosity that underlies great presentation skills - the skills good theater people have in abundance.
Theater people know the value of work.
You’ll rarely catch a theater person loafing around the office and leaving early. Most theater people do theater in addition to studies or work, and are used to hard, often thankless labor. They acquire time management skills to do what they love to do, and some of them do so well they collect honor cards and medals like they were marbles. Attorney Paez recalls the toil and the sweat:
I credit the theater in no small part for the training of hard work and discipline which is so essential in whatever profession one is in. Late night rehearsals, production work, marketing, etc. - getting used to these activities at an early age helped prepare me for the dog-eat-dog world of lawyering. And al the time I was having fun, as I am now.
Wesley Panutat, marketing manager of a multinational company, adds that doing theater production work trained him “to be very detailed oriented, and that every task must be clearly thought out and communicated.” Moreover, to theater people, each task, large or small, is vital to production - believes physician and e-groups moderator Super Perez:
Each job is important, and the smallest job also brings a lot of satisfaction -- much like the great feeling that comes when you hear the audience sigh after you switch cyclo lights to red just as the scene ends…Sometimes you just have to make do with that is given you. If you do well with what you have, you get more chances to do the big stuff. If you don’t do well, you don’t just disappoint the audience or your fellow actors, you also disappoint yourself.
And not just on opening night. Theater people know they’ll do the same show all over again for days or weeks, and still work as hard and as motivated as the first night. That’s what Bing Kimpo, advertising man and voice talent, realized:
As dramatic, profound, an euphoric the opening night experience is, you’ve got to draw up a similar energy for the usually difficult second day matinee. It’s a different audience, and they deserve their money’s worth. And pulling off this show is a true test of your maturity as a performer - or analogously, as a corporate worker.
Theater people can work with diverse sorts of people.
Theater companies are a bunches of people thrown together to put on show. Some of these people are friends, some are acquaintances, others are strangers. Some are friendly, others are not, some are weird, others are weirder, and you have little choice but to work with them for the duration of the production. Theater people also constantly deal with non-theater people: security guards, maintenance people, carpenters, cooks, secretaries, company officials, and even political figures. Maintaining smooth interpersonal relations with all these women and men takes a lot of skill in human relations, people management, and negotiation skills -another superlative set of traits theater people gain in their work.
Celina Cuadro, formerly a Teambuilding Trainor of an Australian engineering firm, has this to say::
“The theater people I met were all across the range in terms of weirdness, tolerance, intelligence and preferences. All agreed, despite varying degrees of orneriness, to prioritize the task to be done above most else, and yet to somehow also preserve an nice enough work atmosphere for all personality types to do the task. It’s a shame management trams won’t always enjoy exposure to a theater group -they could learn a lot.”
Angeli Ruiz, who worked in her family’s firm, agrees:
“I’ve done almost all kinds of theater work, and managing a whole group of people with differing temperaments is very difficult. But this experience trained me to managing all sorts of people in the office environment and in my social and personal life as well.”
Wesley Panutat has just been promoted, thanks in part to his theater background:
“In terms of producing plays, theater has exposed me to the skill of managing people. In the arts, there are of course those with bohemian temperaments and creative idiosyncrasies. I deal with similar types in the workplace and was prepared for them.
The secret is to get people to work towards a goal. Andrew de Castro, a two-time company manager who’s reviewing for the bar exams, admits that one encounters “a whole lot of egos” in the theater:
“Theatre people can have very strong temperaments, but when the curtain rises everyone does what they do for the love of theatre and forget whatever differences they have backstage. I stand back near the tech booth, and watch people who have shouting matches, personal differences and irreconcilable dispositions speak out in fluent conversation on stage, the stage managers always on cue, and the tech crew diligently supporting the actors on stage. I loved watching that.”
Theater people work best as part of a team.
“Mounting a play,” says investment counselor Adrian Martinez, “is so full of risks that the only way to pull it off is to rely on the troupe.” Theater people thrive on co-dependency; they are “team players.” Writes teacher and doctoral student Michael Narciso:
“Because of my experience in theater, I’ve learned that you have to play your role to the hilt whether you are a stage manager, a bit player, or the star of all seasons. Being part of a theater company emphasizes the concept of working well together (even with people whom you abhor) and always at your best because a play needs team effort for everything to fall into its proper place.”
Learning to be part of a team requires picking up a gamut of people skills from staying cool when talked to by someone whose ego is as humongous as a brontosaurus to asserting the beauty of a production when it is badmouthed by a pretentious critic. It is this immersion in community life that generates bonds of trust, a form of group support that helps its members gain self confidence. And sometimes, more than just confidence, as our kinky monk, Nonie de la Fuente, S.J., reminds us:
“The theater skills I learned and the people I learned them with , gave me more than just self confidence. They gave me a sense of openness and creativity to contemplate a priestly vocation. It made me dream and go for the dream. Yep, the Holy Spirit can and does plant seeds of religious vocation even in the unlikeliest places.”
The theater teaches ideals, but grounds them on the stage floor. A production manager of many plays before she settled down to teach in Cambodia and California, Lala Hassaram writes:
“I learned to strike a balance between idealism and practicality. I learned to want to accomplish all those funky, larger than life, abstract goals that directors talk about at company calls. I also learned that doing that began with picking up a broom and cleaning the rehearsal floor.”
And politics in the group? Lala continues:
“I’ve just learned to like people, take politics in stride. and just get the work done. I focus on my job. If I make a commitment to have something ready by a specific date, I go and meet that no matter what. The show always goes on.”
There are no small roles, only small actors. And good theater people are always big actors.
Theater people can cope with change.
Theater is an ephemeral art. A production goes up today and is gone tomorrow. You’re only good as your last show. Or as Peter Brooks put it, we build and destroy. Filipino directors are more down to earth: many remind their actors: “Ibahin mo ang performance mo. Nabayaran na iyan.”
To theater people, change is a fact of life and one might as well learn to cope with it. One lesson: learn to let go. That’s one of the things Bing Kimpo found out:
Not everyone can be the dashing romantic lead, so be the best at what you do and you’ll stand out just as well. There’s also always another actor waiting in the wings - just as good, if not even better. Accept it, and gracefully turn-over the spotlight.
Another lesson: never take criticism personally. It’s all about the role anyway, or another person’s angst, and not about you as a person. Instead, Dr. Super Perez, surgeon, sees criticism as an opportunity to grow:
Learn from your mistakes, otherwise they remain as such instead of being a step towards success. Most criticisms are constructive; it’s only you who makes it otherwise… And next time you trip and fall, stand and continue with what you have to do, Making a big fuss out of it will only attract more attention to your error.
And if something unexpected occurs, theater people apply the third lesson: improvise. That’s sort of like the skill in ‘adlibbing” mentioned earlier. Wesley Panutat adds something else:
I learned resourcefulness. No matter how comprehensive a production plan is, things go wrong or things don’t go as scheduled. I learned in theater that there are more ways to skin a cat, and true enough, I‘ve skinned a couple of felines in different ways, both in the theater and at work.
And sometimes you have to skin the feline yourself. Angeli Ruiz says that when no one was around to paint the floor, she went ahead and painted it herself- like in the “real world.” She calls it self-sufficiency. Katrina Flores, head writer of a major television network, lists an omnibus of traits she learned to handle the vagaries of theater life: patience, tolerance, professionalism, diplomacy, perseverance, staying calm, absolute honesty, and silence.
That’s some list, and I’m sure my colleagues in the theater can add more to the five statements I’ve laid down here. But enough has been said to show that theater teaches people habits of voice, mind and body that prove to be indispensable in business, politics, academe, medicine, law, what have you.
Many businesses are, in fact, aware of this, and market not a good or a service, but an experience. You just don’t slip into a pair of sneakers, but walk through air. You just don’t buy a beauty product, you also sustain tribal communities. You just don’t eat cheeseburgers, you chill out with family and friends.
Shakespeare was never more right: the world is a stage, or has become more obviously a stage. Indeed, many companies now market not a good or a service, but an experience. You just don’t slip into a pair of sneakers, but walk through air. You just don’t buy a beauty product, you also sustain tribal communities. You just don’t eat cheeseburgers, you chill out with family and friends. In this “experience economy,” people with a sense of theater will have an edge in the workplace.
So beyond the balance sheets and research reports, beyond demographics and regression equations lie an aesthetic experience that will benefit one’s professional future. Seek it out. Claim it your own. And let the magic flow.
Imagination rules the world. It is no longer enough that you appeal to people’s self-interest, you must also appeal to their imagination.
I’ve learned that everyday life and regular people are magical. I think someone else said this before, but everyone is beautiful, in the right light.
I learned that life is more like a dance, a play, a song. Life is dancing till your body ached, acting your heart out, and singing out your lungs and in the end, touching someone’s soul.
Ricardo Abad
“All the world’s a stage,” says Shakespeare, “and all the men and women merely players.” If Shakespeare is right, then the best among us are those with a knack for performing. These are the women and men who have an edge over others because they’ve also got the talent to impress a client, unite a group, strike a deal, inspire a team, host an event, and think on one’s feet. It’s a set of special qualities many companies desire in their work force.
I’ve been an adviser of a school theater company for twenty years. Each year I train students to act and direct and also oversee their work in production and marketing. The majority of these students do not become professional theater artists. They instead pursue careers in management, advertising, law, medicine, media, social development, computer technology, and the academe. Some, bless them, even enter the religious life.
Has their theater experience helped them in professional lives? I e-mailed the graduates and asked them that question. Their unanimous answer was a resounding yes: theater helped them shine in their jobs. I sum up their replies in five statements:
Theater people have superb presentation skills.
The advertising giant Antonio Mercado preferred to hire applicants with theater backgrounds in his ad firm These applicants, he reasoned, have the personality and the panache to sell an ad campaign to clients. This power to persuade also makes theater people ideal trainors. Ron Capinding, star of many Shakespeare plays, is a teacher who also he is frequently asked to train batches of aspiring actors in a major network every summer. Joseph dela Cruz is another teacher who doubles up as a trainor of the famous Seven Habits workshop. Voltaire Gonzales joined the marketing staff a major car company after college, and found his position rise when he displayed his skills as a trainor. He is now a licensed regional instructor for the multinational company.
What makes theater artists gifted trainors? Carelle Mangaliag was once a training director and unit manager of a major insurance firm. Her theater life, she said, helped her company to boost sales:
“Theater helped me to do my work with passion. And infect people with it,” she said. “I teach insurance people how to sell, how to make sales calls, overcome call reluctance, reach quotas, and make a difference in people’s lives. Theater helped me to do my work with passion. And infect people with it. I go straight to the gut in motivating people. The result: my agency grew 248% because everyone at work felt good about themselves.”
Even lawyers like Eboy Paez found his bag of presentation skills useful in court. Beyond stage eloquence, he found his theater improvisation exercises vital:
“On more than one occasion, I’ve convinced judges to grant me a postponement by coughing and acting ill. And I can never say enough about the art of adlibbing -or thinking on your feet -- that has prepared me to be on the ball when arguing in court.”
Devi Ignacio-Paez, Eboy’s spouse and former co-star, became a high school English teacher and also knows the value of being on your toes.
”When the intended lesson plan would fall apart in one class when it worked perfectly just the other day in another class, then there was a need to shift styles and speech and approach without skipping a beat so as not to waste time nor to leave the class bored and fidgety in their seats. Theater work helped me ride through the shift, and stay poised, not panicky or flustered.”
Even laid back fiction writers like Peter Mayshle drew on memories of a physical theater when asked to read passages from a new novel in front of an audience. Peter said he almost instinctively adapted an open stance and a relaxed posture, adding:
“I was also conscious of voice projection as it was a fairly large space and people were sort of scattered everywhere, and the whole theater training made me more confident I guess which I otherwise wouldn’t have had.“
I once asked Rolando S. Tinio what he sought the most in actors. “Generosity,” he said.
It’s the same sense of generosity that underlies great presentation skills - the skills good theater people have in abundance.
Theater people know the value of work.
You’ll rarely catch a theater person loafing around the office and leaving early. Most theater people do theater in addition to studies or work, and are used to hard, often thankless labor. They acquire time management skills to do what they love to do, and some of them do so well they collect honor cards and medals like they were marbles. Attorney Paez recalls the toil and the sweat:
I credit the theater in no small part for the training of hard work and discipline which is so essential in whatever profession one is in. Late night rehearsals, production work, marketing, etc. - getting used to these activities at an early age helped prepare me for the dog-eat-dog world of lawyering. And al the time I was having fun, as I am now.
Wesley Panutat, marketing manager of a multinational company, adds that doing theater production work trained him “to be very detailed oriented, and that every task must be clearly thought out and communicated.” Moreover, to theater people, each task, large or small, is vital to production - believes physician and e-groups moderator Super Perez:
Each job is important, and the smallest job also brings a lot of satisfaction -- much like the great feeling that comes when you hear the audience sigh after you switch cyclo lights to red just as the scene ends…Sometimes you just have to make do with that is given you. If you do well with what you have, you get more chances to do the big stuff. If you don’t do well, you don’t just disappoint the audience or your fellow actors, you also disappoint yourself.
And not just on opening night. Theater people know they’ll do the same show all over again for days or weeks, and still work as hard and as motivated as the first night. That’s what Bing Kimpo, advertising man and voice talent, realized:
As dramatic, profound, an euphoric the opening night experience is, you’ve got to draw up a similar energy for the usually difficult second day matinee. It’s a different audience, and they deserve their money’s worth. And pulling off this show is a true test of your maturity as a performer - or analogously, as a corporate worker.
Theater people can work with diverse sorts of people.
Theater companies are a bunches of people thrown together to put on show. Some of these people are friends, some are acquaintances, others are strangers. Some are friendly, others are not, some are weird, others are weirder, and you have little choice but to work with them for the duration of the production. Theater people also constantly deal with non-theater people: security guards, maintenance people, carpenters, cooks, secretaries, company officials, and even political figures. Maintaining smooth interpersonal relations with all these women and men takes a lot of skill in human relations, people management, and negotiation skills -another superlative set of traits theater people gain in their work.
Celina Cuadro, formerly a Teambuilding Trainor of an Australian engineering firm, has this to say::
“The theater people I met were all across the range in terms of weirdness, tolerance, intelligence and preferences. All agreed, despite varying degrees of orneriness, to prioritize the task to be done above most else, and yet to somehow also preserve an nice enough work atmosphere for all personality types to do the task. It’s a shame management trams won’t always enjoy exposure to a theater group -they could learn a lot.”
Angeli Ruiz, who worked in her family’s firm, agrees:
“I’ve done almost all kinds of theater work, and managing a whole group of people with differing temperaments is very difficult. But this experience trained me to managing all sorts of people in the office environment and in my social and personal life as well.”
Wesley Panutat has just been promoted, thanks in part to his theater background:
“In terms of producing plays, theater has exposed me to the skill of managing people. In the arts, there are of course those with bohemian temperaments and creative idiosyncrasies. I deal with similar types in the workplace and was prepared for them.
The secret is to get people to work towards a goal. Andrew de Castro, a two-time company manager who’s reviewing for the bar exams, admits that one encounters “a whole lot of egos” in the theater:
“Theatre people can have very strong temperaments, but when the curtain rises everyone does what they do for the love of theatre and forget whatever differences they have backstage. I stand back near the tech booth, and watch people who have shouting matches, personal differences and irreconcilable dispositions speak out in fluent conversation on stage, the stage managers always on cue, and the tech crew diligently supporting the actors on stage. I loved watching that.”
Theater people work best as part of a team.
“Mounting a play,” says investment counselor Adrian Martinez, “is so full of risks that the only way to pull it off is to rely on the troupe.” Theater people thrive on co-dependency; they are “team players.” Writes teacher and doctoral student Michael Narciso:
“Because of my experience in theater, I’ve learned that you have to play your role to the hilt whether you are a stage manager, a bit player, or the star of all seasons. Being part of a theater company emphasizes the concept of working well together (even with people whom you abhor) and always at your best because a play needs team effort for everything to fall into its proper place.”
Learning to be part of a team requires picking up a gamut of people skills from staying cool when talked to by someone whose ego is as humongous as a brontosaurus to asserting the beauty of a production when it is badmouthed by a pretentious critic. It is this immersion in community life that generates bonds of trust, a form of group support that helps its members gain self confidence. And sometimes, more than just confidence, as our kinky monk, Nonie de la Fuente, S.J., reminds us:
“The theater skills I learned and the people I learned them with , gave me more than just self confidence. They gave me a sense of openness and creativity to contemplate a priestly vocation. It made me dream and go for the dream. Yep, the Holy Spirit can and does plant seeds of religious vocation even in the unlikeliest places.”
The theater teaches ideals, but grounds them on the stage floor. A production manager of many plays before she settled down to teach in Cambodia and California, Lala Hassaram writes:
“I learned to strike a balance between idealism and practicality. I learned to want to accomplish all those funky, larger than life, abstract goals that directors talk about at company calls. I also learned that doing that began with picking up a broom and cleaning the rehearsal floor.”
And politics in the group? Lala continues:
“I’ve just learned to like people, take politics in stride. and just get the work done. I focus on my job. If I make a commitment to have something ready by a specific date, I go and meet that no matter what. The show always goes on.”
There are no small roles, only small actors. And good theater people are always big actors.
Theater people can cope with change.
Theater is an ephemeral art. A production goes up today and is gone tomorrow. You’re only good as your last show. Or as Peter Brooks put it, we build and destroy. Filipino directors are more down to earth: many remind their actors: “Ibahin mo ang performance mo. Nabayaran na iyan.”
To theater people, change is a fact of life and one might as well learn to cope with it. One lesson: learn to let go. That’s one of the things Bing Kimpo found out:
Not everyone can be the dashing romantic lead, so be the best at what you do and you’ll stand out just as well. There’s also always another actor waiting in the wings - just as good, if not even better. Accept it, and gracefully turn-over the spotlight.
Another lesson: never take criticism personally. It’s all about the role anyway, or another person’s angst, and not about you as a person. Instead, Dr. Super Perez, surgeon, sees criticism as an opportunity to grow:
Learn from your mistakes, otherwise they remain as such instead of being a step towards success. Most criticisms are constructive; it’s only you who makes it otherwise… And next time you trip and fall, stand and continue with what you have to do, Making a big fuss out of it will only attract more attention to your error.
And if something unexpected occurs, theater people apply the third lesson: improvise. That’s sort of like the skill in ‘adlibbing” mentioned earlier. Wesley Panutat adds something else:
I learned resourcefulness. No matter how comprehensive a production plan is, things go wrong or things don’t go as scheduled. I learned in theater that there are more ways to skin a cat, and true enough, I‘ve skinned a couple of felines in different ways, both in the theater and at work.
And sometimes you have to skin the feline yourself. Angeli Ruiz says that when no one was around to paint the floor, she went ahead and painted it herself- like in the “real world.” She calls it self-sufficiency. Katrina Flores, head writer of a major television network, lists an omnibus of traits she learned to handle the vagaries of theater life: patience, tolerance, professionalism, diplomacy, perseverance, staying calm, absolute honesty, and silence.
That’s some list, and I’m sure my colleagues in the theater can add more to the five statements I’ve laid down here. But enough has been said to show that theater teaches people habits of voice, mind and body that prove to be indispensable in business, politics, academe, medicine, law, what have you.
Many businesses are, in fact, aware of this, and market not a good or a service, but an experience. You just don’t slip into a pair of sneakers, but walk through air. You just don’t buy a beauty product, you also sustain tribal communities. You just don’t eat cheeseburgers, you chill out with family and friends.
Shakespeare was never more right: the world is a stage, or has become more obviously a stage. Indeed, many companies now market not a good or a service, but an experience. You just don’t slip into a pair of sneakers, but walk through air. You just don’t buy a beauty product, you also sustain tribal communities. You just don’t eat cheeseburgers, you chill out with family and friends. In this “experience economy,” people with a sense of theater will have an edge in the workplace.
So beyond the balance sheets and research reports, beyond demographics and regression equations lie an aesthetic experience that will benefit one’s professional future. Seek it out. Claim it your own. And let the magic flow.
Imagination rules the world. It is no longer enough that you appeal to people’s self-interest, you must also appeal to their imagination.
I’ve learned that everyday life and regular people are magical. I think someone else said this before, but everyone is beautiful, in the right light.
I learned that life is more like a dance, a play, a song. Life is dancing till your body ached, acting your heart out, and singing out your lungs and in the end, touching someone’s soul.