Building a Small & Movable Stage

Series Summary

As the saying goes, all the world’s a stage—in life, we play a part in the drama of human history. Yet some of us prefer the smaller stages of the theatre. Acting is an ancient tradition of human storytelling, relating important moral and cultural values, teaching lessons, asking fundamental questions about the nature of man and his purpose on Earth. Actors and actress use their craft to deliver their characters’ tales center stage to a captive audience.

In order to create a sense of the “other,” stages are used as a means of separating the dramatic action from everyday life. This helps to eliminate distractions for the audience and focus the attention on the events in the play; in other words, the stage acts as a portal to another world, usually not so unlike our own.

In this free stage design and construction video series, learn how to build one of those small “portals.” Our expert—a director, actor, and producer himself—will show you tips and techniques for building a small, mobile stage that can be set up anywhere you or your acting troupe decide to give a performance. This step-by-step guide to stage construction includes clips on what tools and materials to use, how to measure and cut the frame, what type of bolts to use for ease of tear down, and how to build a secure decking. Let the theater come to its audience!

Video Transcript

" Hi I'm Grady Johnson and I'm the producer of Strange Company and today I'm representing expertvillage.com. I want to talk a little bit about how to build a stage. Now I have a small production company Strange Company and were a mobile troop of actors and when we have to go from place to place we generally have to build our own stage therefore we learn how to do that very very quickly and it is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. What we are going to do first is we are going to lay out our ideas. We are going to have to figure out all the tools we need. I will go over that with you first and then we are going to go over the materials we are going to need to accomplish the task. Once you have all that in place and then we are going to show you how to measure all this out. To be sure that before you do any actual cutting that you are measuring it out correctly. Once you done that and you do your cutting we would go over on how to do the actual cutting then we are going to assemble the entire frame. Once this frame has been assemble then you would be able to go ahead and put on the deck and we are going to go over exactly how to do that as well. Once we put the deck on we screw all that in we would in effect would have created a nice platform that we could work with. Some people just build that much and work right on that. We are going to take it a step further though we are going to go ahead and cut out, measure and then cut out all the legs so we could leg this platform and put it up about a foot. This would then build a raise stage for you. We are going to repeat that process again on another 4x8 platform and then we are going to lag those two stages together. Putting those together after there leg would create one unit 8x8 that would be one entire stage platform that is 8x8. The problem is that it is raw so it is important that it is then painted. So the first thing that we need to do since we are generally in somebody else's space we are going to go ahead and drop off the area and make sure that we don't get any of the paint all over the place and we would go over a little bit how we do that when we get to that section and then we are actually going to paint the stage. Once it is completely painted our product is done and we have a protecting usable stage that we could use over and over again. We also put it together with light bulbs so it is very simple to disassemble this one and put it back together any time we need to."