Thursday, August 21, 2008

Language Barrier of Olympic Proportion

Ancient Chinese Proverb: "Hit all foreigners in the knee, but not so hard that they can't get on a plane and leave."

I started my first day of work yesterday--rehearsal and technical preparation for a play about Herakles (Hercules) which we will perform at the Heritage Museum. For the first time in history, the British Museum is allowing their ancient Greek artifacts to leave its grounds, and entrusting them as a sign of good faith...to China. Well, Hong Kong, anyway. Seems like Greece gets the shaft on this deal.
Tim, my Australian castmate/coworker, wrote the play. It's hilarious. I play Hera and Atlas. We had a short seminar on different accents yesterday and I introduced to everyone the wonder of the Yooper accent. And now Atlas, in his stupidity of getting duped by Herakles, speaks with a Yooper accent. Fantastic.
must go rehearse--will try to finish this later.

3 comments:

The Classic Harpist said...

I'd like to think I played some small part in bringing the Yooper accent to China. They can all thank me later.

niftysunburn said...

Oh jeez... a yooper accent eh? That's absolutely stellar. You should convince them a moose belongs in the play as well. Then you can go on about how the moose is a nocturnal predator whose eyes work on the 1x10^6 - 750nm range (infrared) of the electromagnetic spectrum. They're fierce carnivores and can only be stopped by the heat and light of a mantle from a coleman lantern.

Oh, and maybe you could convince them to change Mt Olympus to Dutchland.

Camber Carpenter said...

well, James, after some serious theatrical consideration, the Yooper accent has been dropped.
Didn't transfer well to Cantonese children...
bummer, dude.