Say you’ve just arrived at Mexico City with a large dance company. Everyone is rattled: The plane almost crashed, the suitcase with the costumes has mysteriously gone missing, and the presenting venue blithely mentions that tomorrow, a citywide strike will lock you out of your performance space. What do you do? If you’re Shen Wei Dance Arts, you make do. Lighting Supervisor John Torres and Production Manager Will Knapp pulled doubletime in the theater, taking hits off the backstage oxygen provided for high-altitude work, while dancers raced off to American Apparel stores to reconfigure their costumes from scratch. And the show went on.

As much as New York City fosters creative work, the actual hard tacks of financial survival require nearly all New York-based companies to tour. Suddenly, into an already bubbling mix of creative personalities bursts a host of unexpected variables. There are theaters with archaic equipment, the uncertainties of international freight, and the struggle to communicate with stagehands through interpreters. And yet despite the many, many horror stories, shows rarely fail to materialize. The technical director of the Joyce Theater, Kelly Atallah, a touring veteran, can only remember one canceled show — and that was due to a monsoon, a tent-like outdoor stage, and the venue’s subsequent ripping in half.

On tours, presenters often ignore the obvious concerns. At the Biennale Bonn, a noted international festival, Annie-B Parson’s Big Dance Theater scored a warehouse venue next to the Wooster Group. But though the spaces were separated by a wall, they were neither soundproofed nor separately wired. The members of the Wooster Group commanded all the prime rehearsal times, so Big Dance dancers either worked from 6 a.m. or crept about silently, wearing headlamps in their pitch-dark space.

Mr. Torres recalled a disastrous tour with the Trisha Brown Dance Company to Palermo, during which what the presenters had described as a “beautiful wooden floor” turned out to be a splintery, plywood mess. Thinking on their feet, the dancers wrapped their sneakers in black tape and danced in the makeshift shoes.

Often even cosmopolitan New Yorkers find cultural differences an almost insurmountable obstacle. When Michael Mao took his “Firecracker,” an update of “The Nutcracker,” on tour through China, little did he know that audiences in Suzhou would bring picnic dinners, wander up and down the aisles, and then shoot a news-spot, complete with blinding television lights, as his show took place. Mr. Atallah recalled setting up a show for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company by candlelight when the Brazilian powerworkers went on strike. As for Italy, legendary stage manager Maxine Glorsky , who has worked with, among other companies, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, said she used to keep a conversion sheet that would interpret the Italian claims of “five minute” delays into the actual delay time, which was usually hours. Ms. Glorsky said she has walked into theaters to discover stages locked at 45-degree inclines, lighting instruments without lamps, and buildings without dressing rooms. “The first lesson you have to learn is to yell,” Ms. Glorsky said of the way to approach touring trickiness. Or, in the case of the missing dressing room, to have a dancer start stripping in the street until the presenter, faced with indecency fines, suddenly finds a way to provide a room.

Ms. Glorsky toured with Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1997 when he went back to his hometown of Riga, Latvia. There, the theater boasted such primitive lighting equipment that the operators (two local babushkas) would spit twice over their shoulders before punching in a cue. The lighting board’s power still failed halfway through the show, but quick-thinking follow-spot operators kept Mr. Baryshnikov out of the dark.

It isn’t always the other guy who is at fault, though. Long schedules and tightly wound nerves can lead to some dodgy behavior from overtaxed production staff. The production manager at New York Theatre Workshop, Michael Casselli, was once the namesake of the “Casselli Clause” in all of Reza Abdoh’s touring contracts. It stated in no uncertain terms that should a staff member find himself in jail, the production was not responsibile for bailing him out.

Of course, some modern artists find all this last-minute crisiscontrol conducive to their creative process. On a Trisha Brown tour, Robert Rauschenberg once had to hastily recreate a set that had been lost along the travels. But instead of panicking, Mr. Rauschenberg, company members recalled, happily scrounged through the Naples scrapyards: a collagist at work.

And, of course, the choreographer whose sine qua non is the serendipitous happenstance, Merce Cunningham, greets everything from missing costumes to stolen trucks to a 6.3 earthquake with genuine equanimity. “Merce loves that! He loves that energy in the moment that forces you to be totally live,” Mr. Atallah said. After all, isn’t that what performance is all about?