Stage left vs stage right: stage directions for dancers

In English, stage left and stage right are named from the performer's point of view: stand on the stage facing the audience, and stage left is on your left. The Cambridge Dictionary defines stage left as the part of the stage to the actors' left when they face the people watching, and the BBC's drama revision guide describes all nine stage positions from the performer's perspective. The audience has its own pair of terms, house left and house right, which are the sides as seen from the seats. Wikipedia's article on stages notes that theatre people avoid a bare "left" or "right" for this reason and always add whose view they mean. Some UK student crews say audience left and audience right instead, as the StageSoc wiki does.

The depth terms have a physical origin. Wikipedia's articles on stages and on blocking explain that older theatres tilted the floor towards the audience, a raked stage, so walking upstage really meant walking uphill and downstage meant walking down towards the seats; a rake built for dancing, the stage article adds, can run from three to twenty degrees. British theatres also call stage left the prompt side (PS) and stage right opposite prompt, OP for short, after the corner where the prompter traditionally stood, though Wikipedia's page on the prompt corner notes that some theatres put it on stage right, so check the venue before trusting PS and OP. A simple memory aid: the first word tells you whose body to use, stage for the performer, house for the audience.

Your crew will meet other systems. French theatres use côté cour and côté jardin, both named from the house: French Wikipedia defines cour as the right of the stage seen from the audience and jardin as the left, names inherited from the Comédie-Française's years at the Tuileries palace, between the Louvre courtyard and the Tuileries garden. Côté cour is therefore stage left and côté jardin stage right. Japanese Wikipedia defines kamite (上手) as the stage's own left, which is the right seen from the seats, so kamite matches stage left and shimote (下手) stage right. English Wikipedia adds that German, Italian and Arabic usage counts left and right from the audience. Then there is the studio mirror: dancers watching their reflection see the formation flipped compared with what the house will see.

Depth runs from downstage, the edge nearest the audience, to upstage, the part furthest from it. Between the two sits centre stage, and Wikipedia's page on the parts of a theatre adds the centre line, an imaginary line running from upstage to downstage through the exact middle of the stage. In front of the proscenium arch there may be an apron, a strip of stage that brings performers closer to the seats. When the audience sits on more than one side, the same page says one direction is simply chosen as downstage and every other position is named from it. In rehearsal, to cross means to move: Wikipedia's article on blocking gives the example of an actor told to cross from upstage right to downstage left.

Combine three depths with three widths and you get the nine areas found on most stage directions charts. The BBC's drama revision guide lists them from the performer's view, and school drama sheets such as Shevington High School's knowledge organiser give the usual abbreviations: USR, USC and USL at the back; CSR, CS and CSL in the middle; DSR, DSC and DSL at the front. On a map with the audience at the bottom, the top row reads USR, USC, USL from left to right, because stage right lies on the audience's left. Prompt books shorten further: Theatrecrafts' blocking notation uses DR, DC, DL, UR, UC and UL, plus RC and LC for right and left of centre. The New South Wales HSC Dance materials name the corners after the prompt side instead: USP, DSP, USOP and DSOP.

Around the playing area lies everything the audience is not meant to see. Onstage is the part of the playing area in view; offstage is the space around it that performers can reach but spectators cannot see, such as the wings, says Wikipedia's page on the parts of a theatre. The wings sit at each side, hidden by legs, flats or drapes hung parallel to the front edge, and the gaps between legs are where dancers enter and exit. Tom Skelton's 1955 dance stagecraft handbook for Dance Magazine counts those gaps from the front, speaking of the first entrance downstage right, and calls the most downstage leg the tormentor. A crossover behind the set lets performers change sides unseen; if the venue has none, plan exits so nobody needs one.

Directing textbooks rank the areas. A directing textbook excerpt published on ebrary summarises Alexander Dean and Lawrence Carra's Fundamentals of Play Directing this way: downstage centre is the strongest place on a proscenium stage, upstage centre comes second, then downstage right, downstage left and upstage right, with upstage left the weakest. The author explains the order by distance, since nearer images hit harder, and by the Western habit of reading from left to right, which makes the audience's left, stage right, feel warmer and more familiar. Treat this as a composition convention, not a law: the same text says that on a thrust stage right and left lose their advantage, and that in the round only the centre keeps its pull.

Writing on dance lighting for Dance Magazine in 1955, Tom Skelton argued that the actor's six-area grid is of little use for dance, because a dancer crosses several areas within one phrase. He ranked paths instead: the centre path from upstage centre to downstage centre first, then the diagonal from upstage left to downstage right, then the opposite diagonal and a central circle about 15 feet (some 4.5 metres) across; Doris Humphrey, he noted, always wanted emphasis on the centre path. The sources disagree in places: the New South Wales HSC Dance materials call the upstage left corner a strong area, where back and side walls converge, the very spot Dean and Carra rank weakest. Seats matter too: Wikipedia notes that some stages angle their side walls so spectators far to one side can see the whole stage.

For a dance group this gives a few working rules. Put the moment that matters on the centre line, and bring it downstage when it must hit hardest. Use the diagonals for travelling sections, since they are the longest straight paths across the stage. Keep the upstage corners for entrances, distance or a deliberate surprise, and test them in the venue, since sources rate them differently. In lines and blocks, offset the back row so each dancer stands in a gap of the row in front. Finally, check the picture from the side seats as well as the centre: a spectator far to one side loses the upstage corner on their own side behind the proscenium, so the dancer at that end of a back line can vanish for them.

English-language theatre has no single codified way of numbering the stage. On a ControlBooth forum thread asking whether a standard exists, the answer is mostly that the marks depend on the show, though one technician describes the usual habit for musicals and dance: numbers along the downstage edge, 0 at centre, then outwards every two feet on both sides. Stage manager Erin Joy Swank describes the same number line from musicals and touring with the Rockettes, and a different set for ballet: a large T at downstage centre, quarter and eighth marks each side, and a centre-centre mark. Since the numbers repeat on both sides, a call such as "stage left 4" needs the side as well as the number. In a venue that works in metres, agree the interval with the stage manager first.

The tape marks themselves are called spikes, or spike marks. Wikipedia's article on spikes describes them as small markings, usually tape, showing where a set piece, prop or performer has to stop: performers usually get a small cross, furniture an L at two corners. Spike tape is a narrow cloth tape that tears cleanly by hand, and stage managers use several colours to tell items and performers apart, sometimes writing on the tape which act or scene it belongs to. For dark scene changes there is phosphorescent glow tape, which the same article says is less sticky than ordinary spike tape. Some venues add small lights at the downstage edge pointing upstage, as Swank and the ControlBooth thread describe, which also keeps people from stepping off the edge in a blackout.

How many marks should you lay? Wikipedia says performer spikes are generally kept for positions that must be exact, for safety or for a lighting special, so start with the reference lines (centre, quarters, a number line) and add personal spikes only where a few centimetres really matter. Many companies dance on a vinyl floor, which Swank notes is now generically called marley; Wikipedia suggests clear vinyl tape, the kind used to join dance flooring, to protect spikes, as it comes off more easily and leaves no residue, and Swank tapes over her numbers so tap shoes do not scuff them. Between two pieces, give each piece its own colour, lift the old marks once a piece is finished, and whenever the floor or set is relaid, check every mark against centre again.

Choose one system for the whole crew and state the point of view in every instruction. Stage left and stage right are the English-language default, so they also work when you perform in a venue with its own technical staff; if your choreographer prefers to work from the house, say house left every time, never a bare left. Write positions the same way in your notes, with the abbreviations from the stage map such as DSL, CS or USR, and make sure each dancer reads them the same way. Remember that a choreographer standing in front of the group and facing it has left and right reversed compared with the dancers: "to my left", said from the front, means stage right.

In the studio, the mirror plays the audience: the mirror wall is downstage. Facing it, a dancer's own left is stage left, but the reflection shows the formation flipped compared with what the house will see, so a shape that looks weighted to the right in the mirror will look weighted to the left from the seats. A Dance Informa article by dance movement therapist Erica Hornthal recalls the anxiety of the rehearsals before tech week, when dancers first turned away from the mirror, so practise facing away from it well before then. Bring the stage marks into the room too: Ballet Curriculum advises using the same aids in class and on stage, tape for tape and numbers for numbers, and Swank lays a temporary number line along the mirrors.

Next, give everyone their spot formation by formation, ideally as a written list with the formation name, the number or area, and the distance from the front. On the real stage, hold a spacing rehearsal: find centre and the centre line first, then lay each number from the centre line rather than from the neighbouring number, which is the rule Swank gives for laying dance numbers. Walk every formation slowly, then check it from the house, from the middle and from both sides. Wikipedia's article on blocking notes that the stage manager records the performers' positions so they stay the same night after night; a dance crew needs the same habit, with one person keeping the final map and updating it after each spacing.

Stancz is a choreography app for planning where dancers stand: you place them on a stage drawn to scale, chain formations, and the transitions between formations are animated to your music, with a 2D top view, a 3D view and a view from the audience, the Spectator view. It runs in the browser of a computer, PC or Mac, with nothing to install, and as apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, with the same account everywhere. Free use covers up to 3 choreographies with 4 formations per choreography, and a paid subscription exists beyond that. The app includes 19 presets, ready-made shapes that adapt to the number of dancers, and a single choreography can hold up to 500 dancers.

The 2D view draws the stage in metres, 10 × 6 m by default, labelled "STAGE · 10.00×6.00 m". Rulers run along the top and left edges, a figure at every metre and a tick every 50 cm, from 0 at the left corner. Two dashed centre lines, always visible, cross in the middle at a small cross. "DOWNSTAGE" sits under the front edge, at the bottom of the plan on the audience side, and "UPSTAGE" above the back edge; you can show or hide the "Grid", turn on "Snap to grid" and display dancer numbers. The plan writes no left or right: with the audience at the bottom, the right of the plan is house right, so stage left, côté cour and kamite. On a 10 m stage, the 7 on the top ruler is 2 m stage left of centre.

The Spectator view answers the question every choreographer asks from the house. Under "Choose your seat" you pick a named seat (Centre stalls; Front row; Front row, right side; Left side; Right side; Judges; Balcony; Camera) or tap a seat on the "Seating plan", which shows left and right; the camera moves there and frames the group. The view then tells you who is hidden and behind whom, or shows "Everyone is visible from this seat." The 3D view shows the same formation in volume. Sharing a choreography read-only is free: dancers can watch it, and "Highlight me" picks out their own dancer. The limits, plainly: there is no PDF export, several people cannot edit at the same time, and there is no dance school management.