Visualise Choreography in 3D: Top, 3D & Audience View

In stage design, the ground plan is a scale drawing seen from above, a bird's-eye view that details the location and dimensions of every scenic element along with the performers' entrances, exits, and paths. It's the ideal view for planning space: who is where, who moves to where, and along which path.

The elevation, by contrast, is a scale drawing of the stage seen from the audience, in other words the front view. A rear elevation shows the back of the set pieces, while a view from the side is called a section. These views are called elevations because they are raised relative to the ground plan.

The two complete each other: the ground plan plans the space, the elevation shows what the audience sees. Dance shows benefit especially from the elevation, because it reveals full-body movement and the spatial patterns that a top-down view alone won't surface.

Sightlines describe what the audience can see of a performance from their seats, without obstruction or effort. There are horizontal sightlines, the view of the stage and the left/right zones, blocked for example by the heads of other audience members, and vertical sightlines, tied to tiered or raised seating and obstructed by drapes or low-hung lighting.

The choice of stage configuration has a direct impact on these sightlines. Round staging is a problem if the performers mostly face in a single direction: half the audience then ends up looking at their backs. The design must therefore centre on how the audience will see the show, not on the internal logic of the movement alone.

For a group show, sightlines are literally built into the choreography: good sightlines guarantee that every audience member can see the performance. Risers raise the performers to improve visibility and create a dynamic visual effect, the most common approach for staged choirs. The exact heights and angles, however, remain a matter of context: for precise figures, it's best to defer to a stage manager or to local venue codes for public assembly.

To talk about space without ambiguity, English-language theatre uses a fixed compass for the stage. Downstage is the edge of the stage nearest the audience (you move down to come towards the house) and upstage is the back (you move up to go to the rear). Stage right and stage left are named from the performer's point of view facing the audience, which means they are the mirror image of the audience's right and left. These terms exist precisely because right and left flip between the stage view and the house view, so naming the frame of reference every time avoids errors. The stage, finally, is the space where the performers move, as opposed to the house where the audience sits.

Not every seat offers the same perception. The ideal viewing point, historically the prince's eye, is the angle from which the perspective of the set reads without distortion; looking from the house towards the stage, it's also the spot from which the show is seen best. This idea comes from the proscenium (Italianate) stage, conceived as a box of illusion built on perspective and trompe-l'oeil, a scenography that assumes one privileged frontal viewpoint, which is why the front view has historically structured composition.

Be careful not to conflate two senses of the word perspective: the optical, illusionistic perspective of the proscenium stage on one hand, and the plain front view, or audience point of view, of choreography tools on the other. In theory, each spectator actually sees a different show: you don't experience the same performance from the front row or the third balcony. As Patrice Pavis notes, citing Marie-Jose Mondzain, to see together is not to share a vision, because no one will ever see what another sees. Hence the concrete value of testing several viewpoints rather than just one.

Previewing choreography lets you catch problems early. Formation software lets you check whether the formations read cleanly, instead of discovering issues in the middle of rehearsal. It replaces disposable whiteboard sketches and message threads full of spacing corrections with a single visual source of truth, and the planning happens while the concept is still flexible, before you commit dancers' time.

In practice, these tools combine a top view and a 3D view to preview the stage picture, the overall image formed by the performers at a given moment, from several angles. You can sync the choreography to the counts of the music, block entrances, exits, and scene changes, and analyse spacing before rehearsal. A formation here means the coordinated spatial arrangement of dancers moving together along predetermined paths, with specific positions and orientations.

Academic research points the same way: the ChoreoVis approach proposes a top-down visualisation with path tracking, floor-usage analysis, and a comparison between planned choreography and actual movement, in order to check spacing, alignment, and the smoothness of transitions. Stancz fits this logic, as a web tool for placing and visualising formations in 2D, in 3D, and in an audience view, so you can hold the ground plan up against what the house will really see.