Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1979 - 7

Chinese. They were wonderfully received everywhere. We'd
go to receptions and dinners and there would be crowds
outside cheering and carrying on-things like that. It was like
a football game.
Theatre evidently breeds people who are very similar
whether in Istanbul or China-stagehands are the same the
world over. My counterpart was Wong Lee and it took about
half an hour for he and I to understand each other; he understood that I was trying to get a show on, and I understood that
he was trying to get a show on. Once we understood that we
both respected each other's problems and he was terribly
considerate. Wong Lee was a professional in a truly international sense and we really ha<;j no problems.
The first thing we had to find out was the program they
were bringing. If you really want to know how successful we
were, we never knew until opening night of both programs
what we were going to do. And even then we didn't know what
we were going to do because they kept changing. But we
decided to live with that. I only saw one-really one and a
half-performances in Peking. They did a whole evening
where they tried to put on everything; it went on for hours, like
going to the Noh theatre.

Scenery

I don't know how many theatres there are in Peking; they
talked about three or four although there are plans to build
ten new ones. The dance company doesn't have its own
theatre. The theatre I saw was like any high school theatre, I
think it had 1500 seats and a thirty-six foot proscenium. I'll be
very truthful-I saw so little technical stuff that I underestimated what they were bringing. The only thing they had in
Peking that they used on the tour was the rug-there was no
scenery at all except projections. But they had scenery by the
time they got to New York! They must have been painting
away like crazy. The scenery they brought over consisted of
drops and things. They didn't have any of that ready in Peking. The term they used there was that everything was "recovered." I don't know how they interpreted that-whether
they found the old drops; the old drops had been destroyed;
or what. But they were covered and redone. It was interesting-the change from what I saw in March to what they
brought in July; they didn't tell us they were going to bring all
this. There were a lot of silk drapes, five or six full-stage
drops. Boy, were they gorgeous! I can't wait to tell somebody,
"I can't possibly light the drop unless it's silk!"
The drops were ten meters high and about twenty meters
wide but they were all in pieces. If you couldn't get a whole
drop into a box you just took the piece and put it into another
box. There were 181 boxes of scenery but they were built for
traveling in China. The Chinese have very little trunks; they

don't have carts to pull things around-they don't even have
that many casters-so they carry everything. Everything has
to go into a roughly 2'x1Wx1W trunk. The only really big
thing they brought was the rug that was a total of 800 pounds.
But they had a kind of Velcro so the rug split into two 29'x29'
pieces, almost a full-stage rug. We used to roll it out during
one-minute scene changes. They developed a special rug
cart and the rug would come out on its little dolly and roll off
the cart onto the stage.

Lights and Sound

There were no technical effects in the production I saw
there, just some lighting. Now their projections, however, are
gorgeous. They used front projections. They brought over
their own SCR dimmers and their own projectors. It was not
easy providing 250 volts and a single neutral. The projectors
use Chinese lamps and Chinese lenses, like a P.C. projection
system. The projection system is incredible because they're
so close; the lamps are only ten feet away from the drop. They
can use six projectors at a time and do cross-fades or all
twelve to make one projection. It's like putting six carousels
together with wide-angle lenses. The interesting thing is that
we even got a projection to work on television with stage
lighting. Nobody's doing that-to have a stage presentation
with a full-stage drop of the lotuses and still have stage
lighting! The slides were hand painted on large, 7x7 acetate
sheets. They can correct the slides by painting them in the
projectors so they are corrected on the screen. In Militia
Women of the Grassland they had to change slides. Now the
ground row hiding the projectors was not very high so they
put six small dancers back there, and when it came time the
dancers changed the slides. They still use the projections
traditionally. They were fascinated by some of Ming Cho
Lee's work, the fact that Ming could work in one-dimensional
lights and drops, painted scenery, or that he could work in
very three-dimensional, non-realistic stuff, or selected realism. They were fascinated by that.
At the theatre in Peking they had, I think, a Siemens board.
I don't know whether it was an auto-transformer or a resistance board. It was German. They made magic with that. They
have a designer-electrician setup. There is the mechanical
electrician who does all the mechanical electrical work and
then there is the electrician who runs the switchboard.
They were interested in the acoustics of American theatres
and in American sound equipment. When we were in Berkeley we went to the McCune sound studio and they were blown
away by the Harry McCune speakers. They were also interested in good, Western musical instruments and among the
things they bought here were a Steinway, tympanis, French
horns, trombones.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1979