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In the days before the Internet and e-mail, I was designing the lighting for a show in Germany. The theater in Munich had sent me the drawings for the theater and the lighting equipment inventory.
The plan and section drawings in German were pretty straightforward to figure out. Deciphering the inventory list required more research. Fortunately, I had a lighting design book that had English translations for most of the types of theatrical lighting equipment used in Germany. I carefully made my way through the German equipment list, finding the English descriptions for all but the last three items. I was stuck.
I composed a fax to send overseas.
“Do you have technical data sheets for the last three items on your lighting inventory list?”
I waited patiently for a reply, which followed a few hours later.
“Yes.”
Ah yes. I now remembered that I was dealing with the German language and culture, which could be very literal and exact. The respondent had indeed answered my question. This was the corollary to “Garbage in, garbage out”, the computer science premise that the quality of the output is determined by the quality of the input.
I rephrased my request in the next fax.
“Please fax me those three technical data sheets.”
The request, more specifically stated, resulted in receiving the desired information.
Success.
Several weeks later, while the German electrics crew and I were working onstage, a bright, energetic woman from the theater staff came over to me to introduce herself in English.
“Hello, I am Greta. I will be the stage manager for your production.”
“Hello, Greta,” I replied, “it is good to meet you.”
She handed me the schedule for the week and left for her next appointment.
The head electrician was a smart, bilingual, straight talking stagehand. Our working relationship had grown to the point where he would share his candid opinions, albeit in a warm manner, on things besides channel numbers and fixture locations.
“When you were speaking with Greta, you said something quite incorrect,” he said.
“What was that?”
“You said that it was good to meet her,” he responded. “How do you know that it is good to meet her? You don’t even know her yet!”
Busted again, in a good-natured way, for being too colloquial…
When drafting the light plot for the show, I tried my best to use the French names for the lighting positions. There was just one lighting position for which I could not find the French equivalent, so I ended up using the English term.
When I arrived in Paris, the head electrician inquired, “Qu’est-ce c’est ‘Le Boom’?”
I pointed to the two vertical pipes located just offstage in the wings stage left and stage right.
“Ahh, c’est la ‘Girafe’!” he exclaimed.
“Giraffe” — of course, I thought — what perfect a name for the 5-meter tall vertical pipe.
The crew became totally smitten by the word “Boom”. They imagined it described the very large sound one hears when a small explosion goes off. It tickled them to no end. All through the two weeks while I was in residence, they tried to work the word into as many conversations as possible:
Or – “Dunn-eh, is everything OK for ‘Les Booms’?” more smiles and more gurgles of delight.
We had a fun time during those couple of weeks.
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Dawn Chiang designed the lighting on Broadway for “Zoot Suit”, was co-designer for “Tango Pasion”, and associate lighting designer for “Show Boat”, “The Life” and the original Broadway production of “La Cage Aux Folles”. Dawn was resident lighting designer for New York City Opera. She worked on the concert tours of Paul Anka, The Carpenters, Diana Ross, and Loggins and Messina. She has designed the lighting at numerous regional theaters including Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre Company, Guthrie Theater, Alliance Theatre, and the Mark Taper Forum. Dawn has earned two Drama-Logue Critics' Awards, two Lighting Designer of the Year Awards (Syracuse Area Live Theatre), and nominations for the San Francisco Drama Critics’ Award, Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award and the Hewes Design Award from American Theatre Wing. She served on the board of directors for Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for professional non-profit American theatres, and is a mentor for the Theater Development Fund’s “Open Doors” outreach program. Dawn is a senior consultant with Theatre Projects Consultants, where she served as project manager for two of the largest water based permanent shows — “House of Dancing Water” in Macau and the Han Theatre in central China.
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