There seems to be an upswing in the number of
theatre festivals held around the world and I recently had the privilege of
working on a show at such a festival in the Middle East. Like so many others it
was billed as an “International” festival and there were shows from around the
world, Australia, South Africa, China and, of course, most of the Arabic
countries.
While I totally get the sense of pride and
the fact that the host country wants to show off their prowess, there are a
couple of complications.
The first being language. The second being
language… and so forth…
I am not only talking about striking up a
conversation with a fellow festival goer, I mean the technical language spoken
on stage. Imagine being an English speaking theatre technician ending up in a
theatre where they only speak Russian or Azeri – this has happened. In this
recent case, the technical staff had some English, but very little and it
seemed the vocabulary was spread amongst them.
The theatre we performed in had at least
twelve technicians at the start of the setup, I still have no idea what their
roles were. Three assisted in focusing the lights, all willing, friendly and
extremely helpful. I called them “Little English”, “Less English” and “No
English”. We ended up not referring to Profiles, Fresnels or PCs, but pointing
and going “that one”. Smaller, bigger, up and down provided their own comic
relief as I tried to get it across to “Little English” who was on the floor and
him miss-translating to “No English” up on the ladder… Not so much fun at four
o’clock in the morning and a lot of muttering of words starting with F.
We had almost no technical terms in common,
despite the fact that I was familiar with their equipment, a fairly recent
re-equip with all Strand fixtures, dimmers and control.
Language aside, our biggest problem was
obtaining technical details in advance. Numerous e-mails were sent, misunderstood,
rephrased, resent until we received a synopsis of the equipment, along the
lines of “8 spots, 12 spots…” Uhmmmm, where do these hang and what are they?
Until we physically saw the theatre, we did not have any idea of whether we
could fly a very important prop.
I do not in any way blame the local
technicians, the problem is that there was no single technical person in charge
of the festival (only two venues) that we could communicate with. There was no
list of equipment with venue plans. We literally walked in there not having a
clue what to expect.
Please festival organisers, appoint a
Technical Director that knows the venues, can speak the local language and
theatre Technical English and can go through the various shows’ tech riders and
answer questions.
A single technical point of contact, is all
we ask.
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