Press launch!

Today has been crazy! Okay, not really that much more crazy than
normal, and the people in our shows are starting to settle in, settle
down a little bit, so that's good, I don't think there will be many
more tech changes that the shows we have will want to do, although we
are adding and subtracting shows throughout the festival, which should
be interesting. First addition is teching tonight at 5:30-9:30am.
Now that we're all on shift though, our tech manager will do that one,
his hours are more flexible (and much worse). I'm now on day shift,
9am-7pm, will be for another four or five days, then three days on
night shift, 5pm-3am, then my first day off, after which it's 3 day, 3
night, day off for the rest of the festival to get-out.

But today was crazy because minus one had two big press launches with
shows from all over C venues, one at 11am, one at 8pm. We only found
out about this yesterday morning 10 minutes before our 11am "tech
rehearsal" for the first, an hour of shows jockeying for position with
the coordinators or testing out the stage space. A few also came up
and worked on tech which was helpful, but there were a bunch who
didn't really say anything to us or weren't even there, and we didn't
come close to doing a run-through with hosts until the actual thing
this morning. Fortunately, I did okay, managed to improvise the
lights with the submasters I'd set up. First time I've done live
improvised lighting in a few years, a little stressful, and it kind of
sucks all your attention, I'd be sitting rigid watching for my cue to
change the lights. Went well then. I ended up running lights for the
8pm launch as well, which was even harder because I wasn't around for
their tech last night, then one of the effects we'd programmed didn't
work and I had to jump to do it manually, and the Korean company,
which got shoved in at the last minute, it turned out when their turn
came that the cue we had prepared was totally the wrong one, but I'd
seen it and was able to make it look more or less like it should.
They got some huge applause at the end despite that initial mistake,
so that was gratifying. And besides all that the evening had 11 shows
as opposed to 7 in the morning. This is awesome! I should get more
sleep though, I'm feeling kind of manic.

This will only have meaning for a few people, but one of the weird
things about doing tech here, besides all the different jargon, is
that for everything where we'd use tie-line in the US, they use
electrical tape.

Okay, one last very exciting bit of news, although it's not really
anything yet... So there's this Yokohama-based Japanese dance company
in -1 doing an excellent dance piece with people in womb-like cocoon
and other stuff. Anyway, their press coordinator (she's Japanese, but
lives in Edinburgh with her English husband) and I have developed a
decent relationship over the past few days. Yesterday, after the show
had been loaded in and started, we talked for a while, and she
mentioned that, for whatever reason, they had been impressed by what
I'd been doing to help with their show (no more than the other techs
really), but it might be good for me to make friends with them. In
fact, there might be some possibility of working as a tech for them in
return for teaching them English for theater. Which would be
incredible. A job I'm actually semi-qualified for! I'm still not
quite clear whether I'd be working with the dance company or the
lighting technician that's working with them, but either would be
fantastic. If it works out, it's just about the most I could have
hoped for from the festival.

Of course I'm half waiting for the other shoe to drop. But this IS
the other shoe! Not that the fit-up was totally miserable, but it was
nothing like this. Anyway, fish&chis&bed.