On a busy festival day every stage has its own pace, and the coordinator cannot stand at all of them. The new Stage Manager role gives each stage its own person with its own simple screen: the competitions on that stage in time order, who is performing in each, and one tap to start or finish a competition. It works on a phone as well as on a laptop, so the person at the side of the stage never has to walk back to a desk.
Already covered elsewhere on this site
This page is about the Stage Manager role itself. Related ground has its own pages:
- The draw, the token system and the projector screen — see event-day token and call-sheet management.
- Scheduling many stages at scale — see how to manage a large arts festival with 1,000+ participants.
- Inviting people into roles — see inviting judges, executives and your team.
What a stage manager does
A stage manager is set up for one stage of your event. After signing in, they land straight on a page called My Stage, and they see only that stage — not the other stages, not the rest of the event. On that page they can:
- See every competition on their stage, in the order it is scheduled, with the start time and the number of participants.
- See the upcoming competitions at a glance — filter the list by Upcoming, On Progress or Finished.
- See who is performing in each competition, listed by number.
- Start and finish a competition with one button, so everyone else sees the real status.
On a phone: nothing to hunt for
The stage manager’s phone screen is built for one thumb. The list shows each competition’s full name (it wraps instead of being cut off), how many participants it has, its start time and its status. Each competition carries the colour of its age group, the same colour you see on the other pages, so a Senior item and a Junior item are easy to tell apart across the room.
Tap a competition and it opens as a full-screen panel. The Close and Start / Finish buttons sit at the very top and stay there while you scroll, so a long list of participants never hides them. Below them is the list of participants:
- The number is the heading and the name sits small beneath it — on stage, people are called by number.
- Tap a number to highlight who is performing right now; tap it again to clear it. The highlight is only on that person’s own screen, which keeps it quick and means a stray tap never changes anything for anyone else.
On a laptop: list on the left, detail on the right
On a laptop or a desktop at the stage desk, the competitions are listed on the left with a search box and the filter tiles above. Pick one and its participants open on the right. The Start or Finish button is at the top right of that panel, next to a row of four status buttons — Not Started, Yet To Begin, On Progress and Finished — with the current one highlighted. The list refreshes by itself, and a status changed elsewhere appears without reloading.
Start, finish and reopen in one tap
The button changes with the competition. A competition that has not begun shows Start, which sets it to On Progress. A running one shows Finish. A finished one shows Reopen, in case it was closed too early. The status colours match the rest of the platform, so the coordinator and the projector screen read the same thing: green while a competition is running, amber once it is finished, grey before it starts.
What the stage manager cannot do
- See or change another stage. Every request is checked against the stage they were given.
- Score anything. Marks are entered by judges; the stage manager only runs the stage.
- Close out results. Statuses such as On Review, Results Published and Cancelled stay with the coordinator.
How a coordinator sets it up
You need two things in place first: your Event Stages (for example Stage 1, Stage 2, Main Hall) and your competitions scheduled onto those stages. Then:
- Open Users & Roles and choose Stage Managers.
- Click Add New User, enter the person’s name and email, and pick their Stage.
- Send the invitation now or later. They receive it the same way a judge does and sign in on their phone or laptop.
A sample plan for a school arts festival
A school kalolsavam with age groups LP, UP, HS and HSS usually splits its competitions across a few stages so that nothing waits behind a long item. One stage manager per stage keeps each of them moving:
- Stage 1 — light music, solo songs and group songs.
- Stage 2 — classical and folk dance, which need more setup time between items.
- Stage 3 — speech, elocution and recitation, which run quickly one after another.
- Stage 4 — mono act and drama, where the changeover is the slow part.
The coordinator then watches the whole event from one screen instead of walking between stages to ask what is running.
Questions organisers ask
Do stage managers need to install anything?
No. They sign in from the invitation using the browser on their phone or laptop.
Can one person look after two stages?
Each stage manager is set up for one stage. For two stages, give each its own stage manager.
Does a stage manager replace the projector or the token system?
No. The projector screen and the token system still run the draw and the on-stage display. The stage manager gives each stage its own person who can start and finish competitions and see who is performing.
Running your festival on eTalenter? See the platform, open a live demo and log in as a demo coordinator to see how stages and the schedule are set up (no sign-up, read-only), WhatsApp us, or email support@etalenter.com for help with the software.
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