Design How to mess up the lights when abroad - your best stories about intercultural misunderstandings.

[johannamai]

I am writing about the intercultural communication errors that often happen when touring theatre internationally, especially from the lighting design perspective.
Please tell me YOUR BEST STORY about touring your design abroad or hosting a foreign company at your theatre - I'd love to hear about misunderstandings that happened because of differences in work cultures - either linguistic (things called differently) or practical (things done in a different way).
All stories will remain anonymous unless otherwise requested.

So many thanks in advance!

 

[MNicolai]

We had a show come in where their lighting guy spoke one language, the interpreter spoke that language but not English, which meant we needed a second interpreter to get to English. By the time their lighting guy's requests were translated twice, the words that we were told didn't make sense for what they might've been asking for. So we'd have to translate back to them for clarification. Terms we use in theater just aren't words that are in most interpreters' vocabularies, and not every language has words for the different technical elements of theater.

Recording each cue might as well have been like erecting the Eiffel Tower. I think we ended up communicating in some kind of convoluted use of hand signals -- as if you were at your optometrist and they were changing lenses on you and asking, "Better, or worse?" followed by you giving some sort of hand signal or nod in the affirmative or negative.

 

[johannamai]

Do you remember any particular word that got misunderstood?

Here's a couple of highlights I've collected so far - maybe inspiration for further stories:

- In Georgia, the LD was brought an ashtray to the board, which was situated openly at the back of the audience. So they kind of offered her the option to smoke in the audience while the performance takes place.
- In some parts of Latin America, one should not use the term "snake" (in either English or Spanish) to refer to multi-channel audio cables, especially in the TV industry, as saying the word "snake" on the set or in the studio is considered to be bad luck. You'll usually only hear such cables referred to as a "multipar", almost never as a "culebra" or "serpiente".
- a theatre team in China made a bunch of MR-16 striplights from scratch, as they did not have the specified fixtures. Never came to mind to check with the visiting LD whether they could use an alternative.
- and then there's the visiting show that switched the board language to Russian and forgot to change it back. Fun for the American LD!

Please tell me more