Chapter 3: Creating an Environment

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! does not simply offer a narrative; it conjures a world — a world whose sensory imprint is as integral to the storytelling as its melodies and characters. In the hands of skillful singing actors, the wind ripples across the stage even if no physical breeze is present. The heat of the open plains can be felt on bare arms. The palette of the landscape — sun-bruised golds, dusty browns, deep cerulean skies — emerges through behavior, tone, breath, and presence. The audience is carried into a place that is both imagined and palpably real.

This is one of the great paradoxes of musical theatre: the stage is an empty space, yet the actor must populate it with a world.

To be a singing actor is to inhabit the environment of both the song and the larger play. It is not enough to know intellectually that Oklahoma! takes place in the early 20th century American territory or that A Chorus Line unfolds in a Broadway rehearsal studio. Such surface-level comprehension — time period, geography, socio-cultural context — is only the beginning. These facts provide scaffolding, but not life.

Creating your environment demands something deeper, more embodied. It requires a merging of imagination and memory, what Stanislavski termed the creative “as if”, and what contemporary cognitive science recognizes as embodied simulation: the actor’s ability to internally rehearse sensory and emotional experience until it becomes physically convincing.

Environment is not a concept; it is a lived condition.

The Function of Environment in Singing Acting

Why does environment matter so profoundly? Because behavior — specific, spontaneous, truthful behavior — emerges only when the actor experiences the environment as real.

The environment is the container through which the dramatic event becomes possible.

It is:

• The air the character breathes
• The ground they stand on
• The social and sensory stimuli that shape their needs and choices
• The atmospheric pressure that intensifies (or alleviates) emotion

When you “create your environment,” you construct the unseen architecture that supports:

• Authentic emotional response
• Physical specificity
• Psychological clarity
• Present-moment truth
• Action

Without environment, performance becomes generalized — a wash of effort without particularity. With environment, every breath, gesture, and inflection becomes anchored, inevitable, and human.

The Twofold Process of Creating Your Environment

To cultivate this skill, the singing actor must devote equal attention to two interconnected processes:

1. Acquiring and Internalizing the Environmental Circumstances

This is dramaturgical, investigative work — but much more than that.

You must understand not only what the environment is, but how it affects:

• Your character’s physiology
• Their psychology
• Their sensory experience
• Their social status
• Their desires and fears
• Their emotional weather

This requires an integration of the analytical and the imaginative.

For example, a singing actor preparing “Music and the Mirror” from A Chorus Line would need to immerse themselves in the sensory world of:

• A Broadway theatre
• A cramped audition holding room
• A fluorescent-lit rehearsal studio
• The smell of rosin, sweat, old Marley floors
• The cold metal of the barre
• The echo of hard shoes across a hallway
• The nervous hum of 42nd Street just beyond the stage door

These are not decorative details. They are the building blocks of behavior. They shape breath tempo, tension patterns, posture, urgency.

Ask yourself:

• What does the air smell like?
• What is the temperature?
• What textures surround you?
• What sounds fill the space (even when unheard by the audience)?
• How does the space pressure your body?
• What memory fragments does this place stir in you?

No detail is too small. Everything counts.

The more sensory information you gather, the more vivid your imagined world becomes — and the more spontaneous your acting choices.

2. Implementing the Environment in Performance

This is where the internal world becomes external action.

I often guide students through an exercise:

Close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Populate the world around you. Do not hurry. Let your imagination saturate your senses. Allow yourself to arrive in the place of the song.

Then — only when the environment feels undeniably present — open your eyes and begin to sing.

This transition is powerful. With practice, the actor learns to carry the environment with them even as the eyes open, the music begins, the body activates, and the performance unfolds.

In early training, I often encourage singing with eyes closed for an entire pass through the song. This practice is not about escapism; it is about attunement. It forces the actor to:

• Heighten non-visual senses
• Activate internal imagery
• Strengthen concentration
• Establish environmental consistency
• Deepen somatic awareness

The goal is not to rely on closed eyes, but to awaken the imagination so vividly that the world of the song becomes as real as the rehearsal room around you.

Eventually, the environment lives within you whether your eyes are open or closed.

Environment as Sensory Pathway

One of the most neglected aspects of singing actor training is the use of the senses — all of them — as pathways to imaginative truth. Smell, touch, temperature, sound, proprioception: these are not accessories; they are access points.

Smell, in particular, is an underused instrument.

Touch is another.

Sound — not the music itself, but the imagined ambient world — can shift a performance instantly.

When you allow these senses to participate fully, your environment ceases to be an intellectual construction and becomes a lived experience. It saturates the body. It infuses the voice. It dictates rhythm, breath, impulse, and the emotional arc of the song.

Creating your environment is not about pretending.

It is about embodying.

Practice of Persistence and Imagination

Like all aspects of singing acting, this skill develops through repetition, discipline, and play. You commit to it not for a single song, but as part of your lifelong craft.

Creating your environment is a practice in:

• Attention
• Imagination
• Sensory activation
• Dramaturgical rigor
• Vulnerability
• Presence

The richer your environment, the richer your acting — and, ultimately, the more fully the audience enters the world you are building.

To be a singing actor is to build these worlds again and again, with increasing clarity, specificity, and courage.

You must create your environment.

And then — you must live in it.