Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1979 - 8

Theatre Training

There seem to be a lot of professional theatre people in
China. Wherever I go in America, I know everybody, and
Wong Lee said it was the same in China. All the technical
people seemed to know each other. I don't know how they
correspond but there must be some kind of underground.
One day in Peking I brought my slides and showed them; it
was eleven at night and they asked if I would come back at
five o'clock the next afternoon and bring my slides with me.
Between eleven and five the next afternoon they had gotten
together 300 people. I guess the underground bicycled out
messages like Paul Revere; there certainly aren't that many
phones in China. Three hundred people came to this lecture!
There used to be theatre training schools there and apparently there still is one. It's very interesting. When I was in
Peking, all the technical staff, including the artists, had been
trained by one man in this university. I was introduced to this
teacher, it was a great honor. I met him twice. It was funny
because one of the things that I had tried to establish was that
I was also a teacher. I had taken along not only slides of my
own work but also of my students at the University of Wisconsin. They were very much into all of that.
Wong Lee, my counterpart, was trained by this man and he
had done a production a while back called The East is Red. It
had a total of 3,000 people on the stage-I don't know how big
the stage was or how you put that many people on a stagebut he had stage managed and directed it.
They are hungry for new ideas and new technology but
there is no "avant-garde" in design. You can't have an avant
garde until you have a garde. They haven't really done anything new since the late fifties. The revolutionary ballet, things
like White Haired Girl or The Red Detachment of Women,
were copies of performances from Russia. I had long conversations with them through an interpreter and told them that it
is really the performance that counts. They should worry
about performance and not about theatres which use elevators or steam curtains. In touring facilities in America the
Chinese technicians tried to take everything in stride. They all
had notebooks and took notes on everything: the placement
of elevators, the use of handcarts. They took notes about
everything we do that makes work easier or better. Several of
them had been to Russia ten years ago and it was obvious
that we were further ahead technically than the Russians. We
got into a discussion about that and they said that they felt
embarrassed about being behind technically. Ming Cho Lee
and I mentioned to them that the English and Germans are so
far ahead technically that the actors aren't allowed on stage
because they are always solving technical problems rather
than performance problems. It was a kind of up and down
discussion about all that for many weeks.

The Tour

One of the things we didn't know the Chinese were going to
do, because they didn't tell us, was change the program every
night-we never figured out why. They brought three programs, like a variety show, and by combining different seg6

Theatre Design & Technology

ments of the performance we did three programs in two
evenings, but in all our performances I don't think we did the
same program twice. There was no way the program printers
could keep up with this so the Chinese and English announcers were the only way you knew what was going to
happen. Deep down there were political or cultural reasons
for everything. When they were in a city they wanted to be
sure of all the minorities; they are as conscious of their racial
minorities as we are of ours. I loved it when they referred to
the Mongolian minorities-the idea of 400 million people
being a minority. We always had to do something Cantonese.
So there was a whole thing which we only became conscious
of later: that they were doing all these performances which
related to the Chinese talking to the Chinese.
There were 156 Chinese on the tour and I was their
"mother" (I know that sounds funny). A couple of them spoke
English but we carried seven translators. There was a technical group that did all the technical work and we started going
places together. I nick-named them the "Gang of Eight" which
very qUickly I had to translate to them and they kind of took to
that. T hey referred to themselves as the gang of eight and
whenever we talked in numbers it became the "gang of eight
plus four" or whatever.
Now, in running the performance they didn't write anything
down. There is no word in Chinese for cue. The stage manager gets the curtain up and everybody does their own thing.
The lighting designer talks loosely to the electrician from
stage right. "Cue" finally got translated as "a group of activities" and they considered me scientific because I gave cues
num bers. Because they kept changing programs without
warning, however, cue numbers became sort of meaningless.
When we got to Wolf Trap with the AutoCue, we decided to
give each show a set of cue numbers and we'd bounce back
and forth. But that gets kind of confusing. By the time we got
to Minneapolis we had to go through another set of cue
numbers and then we had to use a's and b's. We had 80, 81,
82, 83, then if we did another thing in that choice we'd have
80a, 80b, etc. I understand now why the Chinese don't use
numbers, they just do it by named groups.
When I asked about counts I was told that they just did it in
time to the music. I had this wonderful vision of them telling
the man at the Metropolitan Opera, "Oh, just do it in time to
the Chinese music!" We had to guess at counts for a long
time. It was also difficult because everybody did it differently.
In some cases we didn't know where the cue came and the
Chinese would disagree about where the cue came. So the
cue would come wherever the nearest person was to the
stage manager to call it. For whatever reason they just kept it
all in their head. There would be many difficult Chinese discussions arguing whether things were supposed to go up or
down. (I shouldn't say arguing because everything was a
"discussion.")
There was a Chinese stage manager and an American
stage manager. One of the funny things that began to happen
was the American SM began learning Chinese words and vice
versa. Ba mu is the Chinese word for announcer so the
American SM would say, "Ba mu, go," and the Chinese SM
would say, "Tra-vel-er, go." We never had a bad moment
between the Chinese and American technical people. We had
a wonderful carpenter, David Anderson, who loses his temper
and gets very verbal. He never got mad at the Chinese but I
was worried and mentioned this to Wong Lee. His reply was
translated to me as, "We like somebody who lets it all out."
The Gang of Eight went everywhere together whenever I
could get them out. They were hungry for anything. We went
USITT/Spring, 1979

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