Everything you don't ever want to hear as a tech person...

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So today was quite possibly the most ridiculous day ever in my career as a lighting designer.

After improving a bit on the show that happened in Shanghai on the second night of the run, we drove to Wujiang, to do a performance there, in a large theater in one of the government buildings. The theater is huge, has around 700 conventional fixtures of all ages and types, and around 40 moving lights - Clay Paky Alpha Spots, which I chose to use instead of bringing the lights from Shanghai. Unfortunately, it takes three different systems to run all of that... One Grand MA console for the movers, one Ion (the board I have been requesting for this tour since May) to run the conventional lights, and an old analogue system that controls the scrollers that are on nearly every single light in the building.

I worked for the entire day to get everything we wanted to use (around 70 conventionals and 7 movers) condensed into just the Ion, but finally around 4pm, after an incredibly frustrating and mad day of one stupid revelation after another, made the call that it just wasn't going to work, and decided to try to salvage the show by using all three consoles and programming submasters in the Ion to run the show live. So that's what we did. Working even as the audience came in and sat down, with the producer trying to start the show early instead of at the 7:30 start time we were told, I programmed 20 live faders on the Ion board with side light, back light, Cyc light, and front light. Then I figured out how the analogue scroller controller worked, and labeled it in English, and meanwhile the Chinese kid who helps run the theater programmed 6 looks into 4 of the moving lights, and we made a list:

1 - Blue Wash
2 - Purple Wash
3 - Amber Wash
4 - Pink Wash
5 - White Wash
6 - Black

Then we proceeded to do the show with me running the scroller controllers with my left hand, running the live faders on the Ion with my right, and pointing to one of the numbers on the list above, then giving my assistant a cue of when to make the shift from one look to the next. By the second act I even got cocky, and I managed, by pointing at the control screen and making motions with my hands, to convince him to throw in a rotating gobo for Matt's solo. He seemed dubious, but he did it... and so we managed to get one true moving light effect into the performance.

The show had a weird energy, but the dancers were great, as usual, and we made the best of an absolutely ridiculous situation. The most frustrating thing about the whole technical end, was that long after I'd decided to abandon the original plan, due to my inability to get the moving lights working on the Ion console, one of the guys from the theater handed me a list of dimmer numbers. When I asked what they were for, he said that they were the power supplies for the scrollers and the moving lights - a bit of information that, had a I received it in the first part of the day, would have almost certainly let me get the movers working, and saved me all of the improvisation.

My opinion of the technical skills of most of that crew dropped by around 99% at that moment, and it was all I could do not to either shout or cry. Idiots.

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