#154 DAY 12 - 31 NIGHTS OF FRIGHT! 🎃 Shapes in the Stalls

I reached Buenos Aires in the spring of 1997 with one suitcase, a canvas tool roll and less money than I had promised myself I would need.

I had been travelling for nearly eight months.

I had worked in theatre in Bristol, helped a touring company in Rotterdam, spent a winter doing temporary lighting work in Lisbon and taken whatever paid employment I could find between those jobs.

I hadn't planned to end up in Argentina.

I had met a sound engineer in Madrid who told me there was work for people with practical skills in Buenos Aires and by the time I had thought it through I was already on my way.

I was 29 and lighting was the one thing I could do well enough to keep moving.

I understood circuits, dimmers, lamps, rigging and the patient business of finding fault when everything looked as though it should be working.

I could solder a broken connection in poor light and tell from the smell of a hot fitting when something was about to fail.

I wasn't a designer and I had no interest in pretending to be one.

I liked making the technical side of the show work properly.

May I just say this was very strange for a female to be doing in the late 90s.

The Titro Colón was the first place in Buenos Aires where I found someone willing to look at my experience rather than the fact I was a foreigner with a temporary address.

I went there to ask about casual work after hearing that maintenance contractors were being brought in between productions and it had the peculiar quiet of a place that was used to being important.

Even from the service entrance, I could hear the scale of it.

The long corridors, the high rooms, the movement of people behind doors that appeared to lead nowhere.

The supervisor who interviewed me seemed surprised to discover that I knew what I was talking about.

He asked me to explain how I had traced an intermittent fault in a lighted circuit, then handed me a meter and watched me use it.

I got the job on a short contract.

I was told it would involve inspection, replacement and testing, mostly at times when the theatre was not open to the public.

It was an unusual job for a woman in the line of work.

Technical theatre was heavily male dominated, especially the electrical and rigging jobs.

Most of the men I worked with were not openly hostile but I could tell some of them assumed I would be better suited to paperwork or wardrobe.

I learned quickly not to waste time arguing.

I arrived early, did the work properly and made sure I could explain every decision I made.

By the end of the first week, most people had stopped checking behind me.