Rigging & Flies

One of the things that continually impresses us when it comes to theatre productions is how all of the basic components of the set can come together to mask the world in which the audience resides. Between technology and innovation, a person can leave their Morton Street condo, for example, and be sent to a Bobcaygeon cottage for two hours without even leaving the city. With a little bit of research, it is amazing to realize that although many of the different pieces of equipment we use today in the areas of rigging, lighting, sound, and set design are incredibly technologically advanced, all of these main components of production have been around since the invention of theatre.

We are going to take a look at rigging and flies in this section of our site. Before we really get into the meat of that topic, however, take a trip in your mind. Pretend that you are a stagehand or a professional in any area of theatre, but instead of the 21st century it is the 17th. Plays and operas, not movies and rock concerts, are the entertainment of choice and they are all put on in houses specially designed and built for the purpose. There are special concepts when it comes to lighting, sound, sets, and rigging that all help bring the play to life. The key difference? No electricity to help things run!

Now imagine that you flash forward from that 16th century setting to a modern day theatre company. Odds are that anyone involved in early theatre production would be floored by the array of equipment available to companies of the 21st century. Still, with all the advancements, it is most likely that the area that would bear the most similarity to the 16th century stagehand is that of rigging and flies.

Now don't get us wrong, we understand that rigging has benefited from all the same advancements as other areas of theatre production. New materials help strengthen the supports and the cables, making rigging safer and stronger. Instead of relying on a complex maze of ropes and pulleys to manually move equipment from one place to another, many flies are set up to be worked with the press of a button or a flick of a switch. You'd need a wire cutter to compromise the integrity of the equipment now, opposed to just waiting for a rope to fray. Now professional theatres have as many regulations on them as a construction site building Riverdale, Toronto homes for sale, but they are still significantly safer than they were just fifty years ago.

The basic shape of rigging in theatre has not changed very much; anyone walking into a modern theatre, no matter how large, would expect to see, and would see, a series of joists, cables, bars, and so on running all over the roof. Attached to all this would be the equipment necessary to bring out the full effect of the play; lighting, sound, set changes, and so on. It's likely that an experienced stagehand would be able to make a smooth transition from ancient rigging to state of the art given just a little bit of time.

This is really good news for the smaller theatre production company or the theatre student. What is means is that a quality production can be staged without the use of an incredibly expensive rigging set (or fly set). The principles of rigging in theatre have remained constant over the years, it is just the speed at which the movement can be carried out and the amount of weight that can be moved that has changed. Those are the sorts of ideas that we will explore in this section.