Three Stages for Creating Original Theater Scenes

When leading theater workshops, creating original scenes is one of the most effective ways to develop creative thinking and expressive skills.

In my experience, guiding participants toward a deeper awareness of how theater is created requires taking them through three fundamental stages: understanding, emotional communication, and staging.

In amateur theater, working from a prewritten text often leads people to skip the first two stages and go directly to acting and staging. Because the words and events are already there, it is easy to assume that the scene is complete and that the actor’s only task is to perform it.

But a text does not automatically make an action clear, and an emotion written on the page is not yet an emotion the actor has found, controlled, and communicated.

As Jerzy Grotowski said: “A text is not theater. It is only one of its components. Theater is born in the empty space, in the live encounter between actor and spectator.”

Working on original scenes, by contrast, forces participants to construct every element. It does not allow them to hide behind their lines and brings into view every step required to transform an idea into theater.

1. Understanding: Making the Action Clear

Understanding is the first stage.

Before constructing the scene, participants need to know:

• who the characters are;

• where they are;

• what happened before;

• what each character wants;

• what prevents each of them from getting it;

• what might change over the course of the scene.

Not all this information needs to be stated explicitly. The audience does not need every detail to be explained, and an element of mystery can be a deliberate theatrical choice.

However, the people creating the scene must know what they want the audience to perceive and must provide the elements needed to follow the action.

Clarity does not mean explaining everything. It means not unintentionally forcing the audience to fill in gaps that the actors themselves have failed to notice.

Practical Exercise

After a first run-through, I ask those who have been watching to describe what they understood: who the characters were, where they were, what their relationship was, and what they wanted.

The people who created the scene must listen without interrupting, correcting, or explaining what they intended to portray. Only afterward can they compare their intentions with what actually came across.

In theater, what exists only in our heads is not yet present onstage.

2. Emotional Communication: The Heart of the Scene

Theater does more than convey information. Its primary purpose is to make audiences feel.

A scene can be perfectly understandable and still remain lifeless if the audience does not sense that what is happening matters to the characters.

Emotion must not be imposed from the outside, but neither should it be awaited as though it were bound to appear spontaneously. The actor must first ask what emotion the scene requires.

A generic label such as sadness, fear, or anger is not enough. We need to look for a more precise quality: the fear of losing someone, anger that cannot be shown, relief after a long wait, or the shame of having been found out.

Once actors have identified the emotion, they must search for it within themselves. They need to recognize the inner path that allows them to recall it and learn to summon it consciously whenever the scene requires it.

An emotion that arrives by accident may well be genuine, but it is not yet a theatrical tool. If actors do not know how to find it again, they cannot reproduce it consciously or use it with precision in the service of the character and the audience.

This does not mean exposing their private lives to the group or explaining where the emotion comes from. The process belongs to the actor; what must become shareable is the result onstage.

Emotional truth, therefore, is not the same as uncontrolled spontaneity. It is the ability to seek out, recall, and consciously communicate something the actor genuinely feels within an imaginary situation.

Practical Exercise

We can begin with a very simple situation: two people meet.

Before entering the scene, each participant must identify the precise emotion required, seek it within themselves, and recognize what allows them to summon it again. They should not portray it through conventional gestures, but allow it to genuinely alter their body, gaze, voice, and way of relating to the other person.

After the first run-through, the scene is stopped and repeated while maintaining the same emotional need. The purpose is not to see whether the emotion happens to return, but whether the actor has learned how to find it again.

Only later should the circumstances be changed and a different emotion explored, observing how it transforms the relationship and the entire scene.

At the end, I do not ask the actors what emotion they intended to portray. I ask the audience what they felt. The emotion must be conscious for the actor, but it becomes theatrical communication only when it reaches the spectator.

3. Staging: Giving the Scene Theatrical Form

Staging is the stage at which everything that has been developed takes on a distinctly theatrical form.

It is not decoration added at the end, nor does it simply mean adding effects. It consists of finding the theatrical language that can make the action clearer and the emotional communication stronger.

At this stage, we work on:

• positioning and distances within the space;

• body, gaze, voice, and movement;

• rhythm, pauses, and silence;

• entrances, exits, and transformations;

• objects, music, and lighting, when they are truly necessary.

Every choice must serve a purpose. Music does not automatically improve a scene, a movement does not become meaningful simply because it is elegant, and a symmetrical arrangement is not necessarily theatrical.

Working on a scene created within the workshop allows participants to explore different expressive forms without having to reproduce an established model.

It also helps enormously to have seen many high-quality productions. Watching actors and directors work allows us to “steal” ideas and techniques, provided that we do not merely copy the surface. We need to understand why a particular choice works and find a way to adapt it to our own scene.

Practical Exercise

I ask participants to stage the same moment in three different ways: by changing the distances, altering the rhythm, or moving from a realistic approach to a more stylized one.

We then compare the results:

• Which approach makes the relationship clearer?

• Which one increases the tension?

• Which one weakens the scene?

• Which one looks interesting but does not actually serve what we want to communicate?

The workshop leader can indicate directions and suggest possibilities, but should not immediately provide the answer. Participants need to learn to recognize why a particular choice works.

As I often say, in theater there is no such thing as beautiful or ugly: there is only what is done well and what is done badly.

This does not mean that there is only one correct solution. There may be many, but they do not all produce the same result.

Three Stages, Not Three Separate Compartments

Understanding, emotional communication, and staging are not rigid compartments or irreversible steps.

Throughout the process, we continually go back. A staging choice may reveal that the relationship between the characters is not clear enough. Exploring an emotion may require an action to be changed. A change of rhythm may show that a line is unnecessary.

The three stages are there to give order to the exploration, not to constrain it.

Creating original scenes makes this process particularly visible. Participants do not simply carry out a result decided in advance by the workshop leader: they learn to question every choice, test its consequences, and recognize what works.

A scene begins to work when the audience understands what is happening, feels the emotion the actor has worked to find, and encounters a theatrical form capable of holding the two together.

That is the moment when an idea stops being merely an exercise and becomes theater.