You're all Idiots...

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On the 22nd and 23rd we traveled to Xuzhou, a four hour train ride North of Shanghai to do a show. The tech team traveled on the 22nd, arriving in town around 1pm, and then went to the theater and worked with the Chinese technicians until around 9pm, while the company did a performance in a public square in Nanjing, then traveled to the theater on the 23rd, arriving at the theater around 4:30pm for a 7:30 curtain - Not an ideal situation under any circumstances.

Needless to say, the circumstances were less than ideal. The theater itself was nice - gorgeous in fact. The outside was a really fabulous design you'll appreciate in the photos, and the interior was well thought out with great dressing rooms, public spaces, and facilities. Unfortunately, that's where the good things I have to say about this trip end.

Our relations with some of the Chinese crew have deteriorated steadily, to the extent that we now have one guy, Mr. Chen (I'm unsure of spelling, but it's pronounced Shen or Shin) who is supposed to be the seasoned guy overseeing the others, who is actively opposing us at ever turn. He's started refusing to spray paint the sandboxes which get used in the show (they need to be repainted after each performance, since the sand grinds away the paint), he has been telling the two younger guys, who are actually doing their best to help me out not to do things I ask them to do, and my suspicion is that he is behind a string of incidents in which equipment gets mysteriously unplugged at every show (primarily band monitors). That came to a head on this trip when he quite honestly held us back more than he helped. In fact, I don't know of anything he did on this trip that was a help.

For instance... as part of the show, we have video on a white cyc behind the band which shows clips from old films and historical moments in the development of tap, which then segue into songs or numbers in the show itself. When we arrived in the theater, they first wanted us to use their giant LED screen, which is really fantastic, but a. doesn't fit with the aesthetic of the show at all and b. wouldn't take the feed from the program we use to run the show. It requires its own PC, which would be fine if we were only running video, but our video has sound, and has several fades and crossfades built into Qlab (our show control, running on my Mac laptop). After it was established that we couldn't use the LED, they hired in a projector, so when we got into the theater on Sunday, the day of the show, they were setting that up, hanging it from a pipe. I was working on lights, and let them work on their own (them, being around 8 people, variously from our crew, the theater, and, I assume, the owner of the projector), with Victoria giving them feedback about how big the image should be, where, etc. By around 3pm they had it done. It was set perfectly on the screen, and I was happy that it was one thing done and out of the way, which I hadn't had to spend energy on. I disconnected their computer, hooked up ours, and started playing video to test it. No problem.

Next thing I know, they have dropped the pipe back in, which makes it impossible to see the image on the cyc. I asked them to take it out, and they refused, saying that another pipe needed to go out first, which it didn't. Then they said we needed to set the borders and curtains first, before we flew it out. Which is stupid - you set the projector where you need it, then set the curtains to mask it. That's lesson 1 in tech work. Fine. I go up to the booth to work on lights, and when I look up again, they have tilted the projector up, so they can see the image on the screen - which completely undid all the work that had already been done to get it in the right place. I was livid. It was 3:30 - the house was going to open in three hours - and they had just screwed up the one thing that was finished. I ran down the stairs back to the stage, yelling all the way, then yelled at them, ignoring all the bullshit about courtesy that I'd been going along with for the entire trip. Claire, our translator did her best, but her instinct is always to try to minimize conflict, so I'm sure they didn't hear everything I actually said, but they damn well knew I was pissed, and I made a point of looking right at the two who had refused to do what I asked earlier, and said, "You're all idiots." A word I'm sure they knew.

After that, I walked away in disgust, and left them to redoing the morning's worth of work they had just destroyed, and Victoria was good enough to handle them for the rest of the afternoon, letting them fool with the projector until they had it back where it had been when they moved it, while I did my best to get some sort of lights on the stage. I need to emphasize that this was just one instance of the ridiculousness. Other examples, just from this single trip, include Mr Chen refusing to let me move the DMX for the scrollers to a different plug, then yelling at Claire when she asked the theater people if it was okay (it was), something like eighteen people standing on the stage, doing nothing as I was trying to focus lights, their complete inability to get me any sort of stands for side lights in this venue (its been a running problem everywhere we go, since booms, pipes, or even basic floor plates seem to be completely unknown to my crew. If I'd known how big an issue this was going to be, I'd have bought some plywood and borrowed a drill and made floor plates the first day we arrived) - compounded by the sight of four people setting up a stand stage right at 5:45 - far too late to actually put lights on it or incorporate side lights into the show. They laughed incredulously when I told them to get it out of the way, that it was too late, and twenty minutes later Claire came to the booth to tell me that they had found stands for the side lights. I told her I saw, and it was too late. They should have found them that morning, when we would have had time to actually use them. Instead, I did the show without any side light - a pain in the ass, since sides are literally the most important thing in my designs (literally channels 1-12 in the light plot).

What else? Have I mentioned the utter lack of color frames for lights? Or gaff tape? The fact that every theater uses Zooms instead of regular source fours, but none of the crew seem to know how the zoom/focus knob works? Or how yesterday, when a lamp blew (4 people saw it blow and came to tell me about it), they started attempting to fix it by taking apart the plug instead of replacing the lamp? Then they proceeded to tell me that the electric had to stay in until they found a spare lamp to replace it (20 minutes in which I couldn't really do anything else). When I attempted to just grab the base from another light to fix it, I got a wall of blank stares.

Early on in the trip, when it was apparent that there was conflict between our tech people and the Chinese crew, and that the fact that we weren't getting any of the stuff that we needed, Men-Chow, our contact in Austin attempted to mediate by explaining to me that I needed to adapt to the Chinese way, and be "The General" commanding the troops to get things done. I was polite at the time, but in retrospect, I think he is full of shit as well. I have plenty of experience "commanding the troops" to get projects far, far larger than this one done efficiently, and to say that doing all of this stuff last minute and badly is "the Chinese way" is just plain ridiculous. Everywhere we go, the skyline is covered with cranes building skyscrapers taller than those in Austin. Shanghai's metro, buses, and the transportation all through the country are the most efficient and well thought out that I have experienced anywhere I've traveled, and I could give you an entire list of other things that take tons of planning that are done well in this country. Clearly efficiency and planning and forethought are not foreign concepts here. They are, however, foreign concepts to the producers and majority of the crew with whom we have been stuck, and that has made the work aspect of the trip possibly the worst experience of my nearly 20 years in the theater world.

In the end, of course, the show happened. From the dancers perspective, it went smoothly, and the audience liked it well enough, but it looked like crap. No big deal since all they seem to notice is if the moving lights are moving, and if there is enough front light, and those things are easy enough to do. There was a huge dustup after the show about the fact that the floor was completely trashed. This is the second time it's happened, and the word is that it might seriously affect the performances in the remaining days. Acia has already told the soloists to avoid certain moves, and it might be that there will be an entire plywood floor installed at the theater where we're performing on Wednesday. Of course we can't get any kind of answer about how they're going to do that. We'll find out when we get there, I guess, and most likely it will be a crap job, but that's just par for the course now.

One last note about the actual city of Xuzhou. It's insane. Very industrial, emphasized by the fact that our hotel was in one of the more industrial parts, sitting on a busy streetcorner which literally had huge crowds of people doing absolutely nothing nearly 24 hours a day. Drivers here made Shanghai look downright civilized - every ride in a taxi or bus was spent on the wrong side of the road approximately one third of the time, and in a very small amount of walking I was nearly run over twice. Likewise the food was mostly pretty bad, and I skipped breakfast entirely the last morning, figuring I'd rather go hungry than go back to the place we'd eaten dinner the night before (where breakfast was served). The hotel was pretty bad as well, but I've dealt with hotels that were worse. Mostly, all of us were just really anxious to get the hell out of there, and it's funny, but Shanghai actually felt like a relief when we finally got back. Everything is relative I guess....

So there you have it... a long rant about the working conditions here. We've got 5 more shows in four venues, and we were told on the train ride back to Shanghai that we wouldn't get into any of them any earlier than the day of the show. That ought to make things very interesting, if they do indeed try to put a floor down. At this point though, I really don't care. I'm happy to have the two days off that I was going to be working, and it's not like the shows can really look any worse than they have the last couple times. Like I said... as long as I can get the moving lights working and throw tons of front light at the dancers, the producers seem happy. Tomorrow is my last full day off, so I'm going to try to blow off some steam and prepare for the final push to head back to the US.

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