How Parts Known Thinks About Roles, Skills and Credits

When you add a credit on Parts Known, you're not just typing:

Actor – Hamlet – 2025

Under the hood, we're trying to capture something more honest:

What you were hired as (your role)
What you actually did (your skills)
What the work expected of that role (from the writer/composer)
What people who were there can vouch for
What kind of event it was – from full productions to living-room readings

This post walks through how that works – and why we've built it this way.

Roles vs skills: two different questions

Every job on a show has two sides:

1. Role – what you were billed as.

- Actor, Director, Guitarist, Stage Manager, Dancer, Sound Engineer, etc.

2. Skills – what you actually had to do to pull that role off.

- Singing, Dance, Puppetry, Verse speaking, Live mixing, Accents, etc.

Traditional CVs often mush those together. You end up with:

"Actor" in the job title
A separate list at the bottom saying "Singing, Dance, Stage combat"

That loses context. It doesn't show where you used those skills or how often.

On Parts Known, we keep them separate, but connected.

Roles have default skills

Every role on Parts Known has a small set of default skills that always come with it.

Examples:

Role: Actor → default skill: Acting
Role: Singer → default skill: Singing
Role: Dancer → default skill: Dance
Role: Stage Manager → default skills: Calling shows, Company management
Role: Guitarist → default skills: Guitar, Live performance

So if you're credited as an Actor, we assume you were, at minimum, *Acting*. If you're credited as a Sound Engineer, we know you were using Live sound skills.

That's the base layer.

Works and characters can add extra skills

For scripted work – plays, musicals, operas, ballets – there's more to it than "Actor".

Each Work (play/musical/etc.) can define Characters:

Named roles ("Hamlet", "Eliza Doolittle", "Angel")
Ensembles ("Ensemble", "Chorus", "Dancers")

The author or rights-holder can then attach skills to each character, on top of the role's defaults.

For example:

Character: Eliza Doolittle
Default role: Actor
Skills from role: Acting
Extra skills added at work level:
– Singing
– Dance
– RP accent
– Mezzo-soprano
– Belt

So the author is saying:

"Anyone playing Eliza needs to be able to act and sing and dance, and we're expecting this kind of voice and accent."

Those skills live at the work/character level – they're part of the piece, not just one production.

When you add a credit, we combine the two

When you log a credit on Parts Known, here's what happens behind the scenes.

If it's a scripted show and you pick a character

Let's say you add:

Event: Space Hamlet – 2025 tour
Role: Actor
Character: Hamlet

We:

1. Look up the default skills for Actor → Acting

2. Look up the skills for Hamlet on that work →

- maybe Singing, Stage combat, Shakespearean verse, RP accent

We then pre-fill your credit with the union of those:

Acting, Singing, Stage combat, Shakespearean verse, RP accent

In the UI you'll see something like:

Skills for this credit (from the role and character):
Acting, Singing, Stage combat, Shakespearean verse, RP accent
`[+ Add another]`

You can then:

Remove anything that didn't apply in this production
Add anything extra that did (e.g. Puppetry if this staging used it, or Guitar if you played onstage)

If it's a concert, gig or other non-scripted event

If you add:

Event: Jazz Night at The Dog & Duck
Role: Guitarist

We:

1. Look up the default skills for Guitarist → Guitar, maybe Live performance

2. Pre-fill those as your skills for this credit.

You then tick any extras:

Improvisation, MD from the guitar, Live looping, Backing vocals

In both cases, we're trying to capture what you actually used, not just your job title.

Skills live in a tree, not a flat list

Skills can be broad ("Singing") or very specific ("Belt", "Mezzo-soprano", "RP accent", "Shakespearean acting").

Instead of inventing a hundred separate fields, Parts Known uses a skills tree.

For example:

Singing

- Voice type

- Soprano

- Mezzo-soprano

- Alto

- Tenor, etc.

- Styles / techniques

- Belt

- Legit

- Mix

- Harmony singing

Acting

- Styles

- Shakespearean verse / Shakespearean acting

- Naturalism

- Physical theatre

- Clown / Bouffon

- Accents

- RP

- General American

- Other accent sets

So "Shakespearean acting" isn't a totally separate skill on its own; it's a child of Acting – one of several acting styles you can tag.

On a credit, we might end up storing that you used:

Singing, Mezzo-soprano, Belt, Acting, Shakespearean verse, RP accent

On your profile, we can then summarise that as:

Singing – Mezzo-soprano; styles: Belt
Acting – Shakespearean verse; accents: RP

Without losing the detail about what kind of acting you've actually been doing.

Formal productions vs informal work

Not all work happens in "official" structures.

Sometimes it's:

A workshop reading in your living room
A scratch night in a rehearsal room
A class project with no real company behind it

We want you to be able to log this honestly without polluting the database with fake companies and venues.

So when you create an event on Parts Known, you can say:

Who produced it?

- An existing company/group

- A new group you want to add

- Or: "It was self-organised / informal (no official company)"

Where did it happen?

- An existing venue

- A new venue you want to add

- Or: "It was an informal/private space (rehearsal room, living room, etc.)"

If you choose the informal options:

We don't create a Group or Venue record.
We store simple notes like "Self-produced with friends" or "Reading in a private flat in Leeds".
Your credit still appears on your profile and can still be verified and endorsed by collaborators – it just won't show up as if there's a formal company or venue in the directory.

That way:

Your informal and self-produced work is visible and counts.
We don't turn every living room into "Dan's Living Room Theatre Ltd." in the database.

Provisional works, groups and venues

What if there is a real company or venue, but they're not on Parts Known yet?

For example:

You do a show with "Space Hamlet Players" at "Upstairs at The Dog & Duck", but nobody from that company or venue has joined Parts Known yet.

We let you create those entries so you can log your credit—but we mark them as provisional:

"Space Hamlet Players (provisional company – created by [User])"
"Upstairs at The Dog & Duck (provisional venue – created by [User])"

Later, when someone from the real company or venue joins, they'll be able to:

Claim that page and take control of it.
Verify which productions and credits are genuinely theirs.

Your existing credits stay attached; they just move from "user-created shell" to an official company/venue profile.

Verification vs endorsements

The other piece of the puzzle is who can vouch for all this.

We separate two questions:

1. Verification – Did you actually do this job on this show?

2. Endorsement – What did people see you do well on this show?

1. Event-level verification

At the event level, verification comes from organisations:

Companies/Groups can verify productions they ran.
Venues can verify that a production really happened in their space.
Work authors/rights-holders can verify that a production is an official staging of their work.

This answers:

"Did this production actually exist, at this place, of this work, under this company?"

On an event page you might see:

Verified as an official production by Open Door Theatre, Norwich Puppet Theatre, and Daniel Sturman (author of Space Hamlet).

2. Credit-level verification

At the credit level, verification comes from:

The company/group that ran the production (for their own events).
Collaborators who were also on that show.

This answers:

"Did this person actually do this job on this production?"

On a credit you might see:

Verified by Open Door Theatre and 3 collaborators.

Venues and authors don't verify individuals; they verify productions.

3. Endorsements

In the same flow, collaborators can also:

Tick which skills they saw you use on that show.
Optionally add a short note about your work.

Those are stored as endorsements on your skills for that credit.

On a specific credit:

Skills used on this production:
– Singing (endorsed by 2 collaborators)
– Belt (endorsed by 2)
– Acting (endorsed by 1)

Across your whole profile:

Singing – endorsed on 6 productions (Belt, Legit)
Stage combat – endorsed on 3 productions
Live mixing – endorsed on 4 concerts

Why we're doing it this way

A few reasons:

Context matters

Saying "I can sing" means something very different if you've belted Eliza in a six-show week vs. sung backing vocals in one choir concert. Credits + roles + skills + endorsements + context (formal vs informal, who ran it, where it was) give that detail.

Every credit counts, but not all are the same

You can list your community work, student shows, living-room readings and major runs side by side. Verification and endorsements help show how often and where you've been trusted, without gatekeeping what "counts".

Multi-hyphenates need nuance

Actor-musicians, drag artists, designers who stage-manage, writer-performers – all of that can be represented honestly, without collapsing everything into "Actor" or "Multi-talented".

Future casting/search needs structure

Long-term, this lets people search for things like:

- "Actor-musician with verified stage combat, 3+ Shakespeare productions"

- "Singing roles with Mezzo-soprano + Belt"

- "People who've done live mixing for touring bands"

- "Official productions of Hamlet in Hastings"

You can't do that with a flat PDF.

What you need to do as a user

You don't need to think about all of this when you sign up.

In practice, it looks like:

1. Add a credit

- Choose the event (or create it, formal or informal)

- Choose your role

- Choose a character if it's a scripted show

2. Check the pre-filled skills

- We'll suggest skills based on your role and, if relevant, the character.

- Remove anything that doesn't apply and add anything that does.

3. Invite a collaborator

- Share your invite link with someone who was on the show.

- They can confirm the credit, tick the skills they saw you use, and optionally add a short note.

That's it. We handle the rest.

Where this goes next

Right now, all of this powers:

A more honest, detailed portfolio for you
A better way for your collaborators and companies to vouch for you
A fairer record of how skills actually show up in real productions and events – from mainstage runs to living-room scratch

As more people, groups and venues use Parts Known, this structure becomes the backbone of:

Casting and opportunity search
Work discovery and licensing
A living map of who does what, where, and with whom in the performing arts

If you want your credits and skills to be part of that from the beginning, you can:

[Create your free profile]

[Learn about Founding Members →]

Every credit you add – and every time you vouch for someone else – helps build a more honest record of the work we all do.