Self-Made: How I Became a Stage Manager Without a Degree

In this week’s article, I asked my good friend Pamela Villanueva Gijon (or Pammy) to share her story about how she became a successful stage manager working for one of the most cutting-edge cruise lines in the world.

Pammy is from Mexico and took an alternative route to get to stage management using the skills and resources she had available to her. It is becoming more and more common to attend a university to gain a formal education about leadership and stage management styles. School can be useful and it is not required to become a stage manager. This is her story and the grit it took to reach her goals.

How Did I Get Here?

“So, how did you get here?” This is the question that comes more often when I find myself in conversations with other Stage Managers.

Sure, when it comes to American or British Stage Managers this question doesn’t get asked…until I tell them I’m Mexican. People like to ask where I went to school for Stage Management.

For a good portion of our world, Stage Management is not a profession nor something you go to school for. So you can imagine how surprised they are when I tell them I didn’t go to school to become a Stage Manager.

Ever since I was little, I looked at the UK and the USA as the countries to become someone in the entertainment industry. Broadway and the West End were constantly mentioned in entertainment news I crossed paths with; so in a way, I understood the vast opportunity nationals have not only in education but in a professional career in entertainment.  I dare say we are not that many Latin American SMs who were born, raised, and made in our own countries. Roughly four out of five LatinX SMs I know (stats from my brain based on the people I have worked with) learned on the job,  with the remaining one choosing a course of study on admin for corporate events.

I started my backstage theatre life in college after spending, at that point, half of my life on stage. Seems to me that that’s how many Stage Managers start: performing. Case or not, this is how I started. I started dancing when I was three years old until I was an adult when I fully stopped around my 20th birthday. The reason I stopped was a combination of many things, but looking back at it now I never truly wanted to become a dancer. Sure the feeling on stage was fantastic, but for some reason, it never turned my soul on fire, at least not enough to stop me from eating all the ice cream and spending half of my life putting on all the makeup. And alongside that, my degree, which was no walk in the park. I chose to study Music Production just because the word “music” was in there. Little did I know I was about to enter the world of condenser and dynamic microphones, their patterns, proper recording techniques, and how audio works, which I will not go into detail about here. However, my Music Production degree is what opened my first door to start becoming a Stage Manager.

Changing Paths to Become a Stage Manager:

It was around the middle of college when I had a mental breakdown. I clearly remember sitting down at the Starbucks on my campus with four other friends. I was becoming unhappy with my degree choice because I couldn’t see myself being trapped in a recording studio for the rest of my life. Discovering the world of audio was a wonderful adventure I never planned to embark on. Even though I learned loads from it and felt I had a good grasp of the discipline, what I discovered through my homework and endless projects was that audio is heavily based on everyone’s personal taste, and I felt I had no direction on where to go, nor the patience.  So I decided to somehow turn my degree into a path that would lead me back to the live entertainment world.

I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of live audio (with only one class about it) but it was the one out of all my classes that could lead me back to the theatre.

Live entertainment kept recurring as an important part of my life, and even though the burn wasn’t coming from performing but from making things happen, finding a way back to that world seemed of ultimate importance to me.

So I held tight to that knowledge and forward I went. At that point, I was very much involved with my college’s theatre department as a swing tech. I decided to become the shadow of the audio tech in the venue regardless of the department I was assigned to. You can imagine that, as a student and a woman, it wasn’t necessarily fun to follow around an audio tech who wasn’t paid enough to deal with students, but in the end, he taught me not only audio skills but soft skills. Even if the experience wasn’t the most pleasant at the time, I understood the opportunity of applying the theory of my live audio course in a safe space like my college’s theatre would arm me with the knowledge to use in future professional opportunities.

Time went by and the first little knock on my door came. I never personally talked to this human, so I’m unable to remember his name. He came to visit my college during a Job Opportunities Expo Floor. I was deep into rehearsals for “Shrek: The Musical” when I saw a friend of mine walking this human around the theatre. I heard Cirque was interested in getting interns from my college, but I thought it was a rumor. After he left, I approached my friend and asked him who he was. “JOYA’s Creative Director,” he said. I remember asking him what he wanted but my friend, respectfully so, didn’t share a lot of details as he was also trying to get an internship with the show.

My Lightbulb Moment:

Time went by and my friend went to do a 6-month internship with them. So, naturally, Pammy started digging; but since my friend was the first intern, there wasn’t a lot of information out there for me to apply. So the second knock on my door came, and I do feel I owe this human everything since without him this world wouldn’t be my world. His name is Charly Ortega.

When I met Charly, he had just left a Stage Manager position at JOYA. He was invited as a keynote speaker to a theatre symposium my college organized, and his talk was the only one about Stage Management and Technical Theatre. After his talk, I only remember feeling and thinking: THIS. IS. IT! Up until that day, I had NO idea what Stage Management was, but the moment Charly started talking about it and explaining what it meant to be a Stage Manager, I was hooked. I felt that this was the thing to do with my professional life. It felt right in so many ways and I was impressed (even scared) by how identified I felt with the skills of the job. It was like my whole family upbringing shaped me, without me or anyone knowing, into a Stage Manager (thanks mom!). So I became Charly’s shadow. Every seminar, talk, workshop, or presentation he had whilst visiting Mexico, I was there. He started to identify who I was and eventually one day while talking after a workshop, I mentioned what I was trying to accomplish with JOYA, and he graciously gave me the direct contact of the Head of Human Resources.

Taking Risks and Chasing my Dream:

Helping my parents to understand what I was trying to accomplish was difficult and frustrating. Both of them, especially my mother, felt that I was gonna be left empty-handed since I chose to not sign up for classes that semester at college. “You are losing six valuable months and I’m not gonna have you around the house doing nothing for that long,” I remember what she used to say. And with reason, because it took JOYA more than a month to get back to me. As I said above, the internship program was so new that not even they were sure about keeping it, and this is something Human Resources told me from the start. But I chose to trust, I chose to hold tight to my dream, and every single time my parents insisted on me signing up for the semester my response was: “No, I’m gonna go work for Cirque.”

And sure enough, THE email came with a starting date (10 days notice I remember), my mom and I jumped on a plane to Playa del Carmen, and the beginning of this wonderful Stage Management life began.

From that moment on, my student life changed completely. To become the Stage Manager I am today, I for sure had to study, but study you can from anywhere in the world. The theatres became my classroom and my coworkers, my teachers. I got used to listening, observing, and keeping my mouth shut (this last one wasn’t easy) in order to be able to soak in the professional life I decided to pursue. I was surrounded by extremely talented humans that were humble and gracious enough to teach me every single aspect of technical theatre. I went through audio (naturally), wardrobe, carpentry, automation, rigging, and eventually stage management.  Along the way, I met professionals that became wonderful lifetime mentors (John Grüber, if you happen to be reading this: THANK YOU!) who opened even more doors for me. I was becoming a Stage Manager in the field, and I was loving it so much that my parents were scared about me not wanting to finish college, but I did. In December 2017 my internship came to an end and I had to say goodbye, for now, to the wonderful life of circus.

Conclusion:

Of course, there’s so much more to tell about my path after my internship ended, but I think I’ve been writing forever and I’m sure you all wonderful readers want a break from my crossings (if you have made it this far, thank you very kindly). So I will finish with this: wherever life is leading you right now, it is ok as long as you are holding your goals and dreams close to your heart and mind. We can’t force things to happen, but we can definitely take the most advantage of the things life puts in front of us. There is no recipe to “become” something, there’s only opportunity, and it is on you (and all of us) to be humble enough to first identify them and then take them.

Thank you for reading. And thank you to my dear friend Bryan Runion for inviting me and sharing with me this space of self-expression.

Also by Bryan Runion:

Phases of Production: The Rehearsal Process as a Stage Manager

Inviting Feedback, Encouraging Diversity and Challenging Tradition