Rigging customers in the entertainment sector, like those in the construction industry, demand productive and effective products that adhere to stringent health and safety guidelines. Safety the forefront of many client’s agendas as are effective and efficient installs be that at a sporting event, musical theatre production, live television or even the circus.
One such example is the work Unusual Rigging has been carrying out for Disney and Cameron Mackintosh’s musical Mary Poppins. The original, which opened in 2004, ran in the West End for three years.
The show subsequently travelled the globe and has just returned to the UK, opening in October 2015 at Curve in Leicester, touring the country until the start of 2017. Senior production manager Chris Boone called on Unusual Rigging for help with the demanding production.
"I have a long running relationship with Unusual Rigging – they’re my go-to company for all my rigging needs. The last job we worked on together was the Barnum tour, which in comparison to Mary Poppins was far less complex," he explains.
Boone adds: "Unusual Rigging have supplied over 60 chain hoists to suspend the Mary Poppins tour. Because of the way Mary Poppins arrives and departs from the home of the Banks family, the show requires a big install for front of house special effects.
"This can be relatively straight forward for a permanent install but when you go from venue to venue, you’re having to re-assess and redesign the rigging every time."
Unusual Rigging was on board more than a year before the production began touring, which involved site visits by the team to ensure the tour was feasible.
"The brief that we have from Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, who own the rights to the show, is that if a venue’s constraints mean we can’t create the magic, the show has to find another home. Fortunately with Unusual Rigging on board, this has yet to be an issue as they always seem to find a solution for even the most challenging of venues," explains Boone.
A challenging venue in question is the Theatre Royal in Newcastle that features a raked stage in a fairly tight venue.
Boone takes up the story: "To enable our special effects to take place, the stage has to be levelled out and this has a knock on impact on what we’re trying to achieve so Unusual had to go back to the drawing board."
The production will be supported by up to 14 riggers and 17 trucks that will visit 14 venues, with performances at each running between five and eight weeks.
"We start loading out at 10.30pm on a Saturday night. This normally takes a full 24 hours so with two teams of Unusual riggers we work day and night, with one team going ahead to the next venue to start the set up at 9am on the Sunday morning," says Boone. "We work non-stop to ensure everything is ready for the 2pm dress rehearsal on a Wednesday with the first show opening on the Wednesday evening," Returning to the idea of safety and certification, the first pilot assessment of the new National Event Lifting Certificate has taken place at Unusual Rigging’s headquarters in Bugbrooke, Northampton.
The certification, designed by the The National Rigging Advisory Group (NRAG), features contributions from NRAG members that include Harry Box from UK Rigging, Mark Armstrong from RTM Rigging, Paul Riddiford, PLASA’s NRC manager and Unusual Rigging’s Robin Elias. This is being offered to those working in the entertainment industry, which includes lighting, sound, video and scenery, those that are frequntly called upon to undertake rigging work, and to carry out lifting operations, without possessing the relevant qualification.
Elias explains: "The one day assessment consists of; practical exercises in marking out, a practical assessment of a rigging related task leading up to and including carrying out a lifting operation, an hour long exam and one to one verbal sessions.
"Currently there is a grey area in our industry, especially on touring shows, where all too often you have lighting, AV or set guys carrying out rigging tasks – and often supervising lifts, with no proof of competence."
The assessment follows the same syllabus as the current National Rigging Certificate Level 2 qualification. However it does not include the working at height module and will be delivered at the two NRC Assessment Centres at Unusual & UK Rigging. As with the NRC, the National Event Lifting Certificate is not a training course but an assessment of existing competence. It should only be taken by those with previous training and experience.
Elias adds: "With this qualification, individuals and companies will have the opportunity to conform with LOLER, enabling employees to demonstrate their competence, fulfilling their obligations under CDM."
Elsewhere, Purdue from load monitoring firm Broadweigh says the technology’s place within the entertainment sector is seen as something of a new entity.
"It is taken time for people to understand the technology and the benefits of the technology. People are now seeing that it can assist rather than replace skilled people in the rigging sector," he says.
The company is seeing a marked increase in the popularity, with sales in the first three months of 2016 already matching the half-year figures from the year previous. One recent project the company has been involved in is with The Toronto School of Circus Arts, which is the largest circus school in Ontario.
The impressive 15,000 sq ft training centre is housed in a renovated airplane hangar and features the up to date circus arts equipment. The school, Broadweigh explains, prides itself on its safety record, so when it needed to set up a bungee apparatus in another venue for a performance, it called on BroadWeigh and its wireless load cell monitoring system to help determine the maximum dynamic loads placed on the structure during a bounce.
Michael Sorowka, chief executive of Paradigm Rigging, BroadWeigh’s technical partner in Canada, explains: "A friend of mine is an aerial and trapeze instructor at the school so I was familiar with the venue. Having introduced them to the BroadWeigh system, we arranged an opportunity to demo the units on their trapeze nets. "The system got the seal of approval from Decker LaDouceur, owner and director of the school, and it became apparent that it would be the perfect tool for a bungee performance that was being planned."
LaDouceur adds: "On understanding just how the BroadWeigh system would work for us, I was keen to put it to the test. The bungee act was going to be put on at another venue and the engineers there required solid numbers of the maximum loads placed on the structure during a routine."
The act in question involves a performer wearing a harness that is clipped into two bungees, attached to the building structure. They are lifted up to a static trapeze bar via a scissor lift, and climb onto the trapeze bar while the scissor lift moves out of the way.
At this point the performer jumps off the trapeze bar directly downward and uses the bounce to perform a variety of flips and positions in the air. At the bottom of the bounce the performer then pushes their weight downward and simultaneously pulls on the bungees to launch themselves back upward to continue their act.
The BroadWeigh load cell monitoring technology enabled the school to get accurate readings of the weight load that the performer placed on their rigging hardware and support structure overhead.
"Previously, the only way of determining these numbers was by rough calculations or sometimes excessive estimates," explains Sorowka. "In fact the circus school was greatly surprised with how little weight was actually put on the structure. They were estimating the maximum weight was in the region of 800lbs, however BroadWeigh’s measurements gave just slightly above 400lbs – half the original estimate!"
LaDouceur says: "With performing circus arts, budgets and time are often tight. There can’t be a lot of down time on the equipment for installation because there are performers waiting to train on the apparatus, so the BroadWeigh system is hardly invasive to their dynamic environments.
"From the start, we have been impressed with the ease of installation the BroadWeigh shackles offer. Within a matter of minutes, we were ready for the performer to attach to the apparatus, less time than it would have taken for a wired system to be put in place. Once we started running through the routine, it was fantastic to come back to the laptop and see the weight readouts for the performer – it enabled us to encourage the performer to give it their all and try to beat their previous maximum load on the system.."
