Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Rigging In China

So i thought i would do a short post out there for all my rigging friends in theatre. It seems that securing/rigging things over here in China are just a little bit different. As we loaded out of Harbin, half the the locals decided to take down there own scenery which included a lot of hung set pieces. When they came in, i just had to take some pictures of how they were rigged up. All of this would def. be declared unsafe in the states.


And further more as we were packing up our sea containers (which is how our gear travels from venue to venue) we noticed how they were securing the containers to travel about 1200 miles!!! With bailing wire!!! The wire was no thicker than that of a coat hanger, and here they are trying to secure 100 tons of equipment with it. If you aren't scared yet, you should be!!!

Last but not least (and having nothing to do with rigging) here is a picture of the stage floor in Harbin. This was the part of the floor we had to roll one of our set pieces on and off our show deck into the show. The scraps on the floor are about 2 feet wide and a foot long. They are no deeper than a pen point and what did the theatre manager do? We got a bill for $5000.00 US dollars!!!!

Lets marinate on that for a minute. The Yuan in China is worth almost 1/7 the amount of the US dollar. And how did they come to this figure. They said the floor was originally built for a million dollars. And we scratched up .002 percent of the floor. NOW, that is retarded.

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