The Unseen Presence

Every audience member knows to look at the stage, the set, and the actors. Few ever look up. Yet above nearly every theater performance lies an entire world of hardware, counterweights, motors, and steel. Rigging is both invisible and essential — a system of trust that allows scenery to fly, lights to focus, and curtains to rise.

For performers and crew, that trust is absolute. You step onstage or work in the wings with the expectation that what’s overhead will stay overhead.

What We Often Overlook

Because rigging is out of sight, it often falls out of mind.

• Counterweight systems may go years without proper inspection.
• Temporary rigging is sometimes improvised, relying on convenience instead of engineering.
• Old hardware remains in use long past its service life.
• Loads creep upward as productions push the limits of what a batten can safely carry.
• Dead-hung elements — those without counterweights or movement — may be forgotten entirely, left uninspected because they don’t change.

The result is a ceiling filled with equipment that may look orderly but whose condition is unknown.

Why It Matters

Rigging is one of the few safety elements where failure is rarely minor. A single dropped shackle, a slipping counterweight, or a failed line can change a performance into an emergency in seconds.

Inspections and certifications exist for a reason. ANSI E1.47 and related standards recommend regular review of entertainment rigging systems. But just as with stages and air systems, compliance is only the starting point. The real question is whether everyone who steps under the grid can trust what’s above them.

Questions We Should Be Asking

The larger conversation isn’t about whether rigging exists — it’s about how we keep it reliable, safe, and respected.

• When was the last full inspection, and is it documented?
• Do we treat dead-hung and fixed elements with the same seriousness as moving linesets?
• Are loads calculated, tracked, and verified, or are battens filled until “they still move”?
• Is hardware replaced on schedule, or only when it visibly fails?
• Do crews have the training to recognize problems, or does everything default to “it’s always worked that way”?

These aren’t just technical questions. They are questions of trust — trust in the unseen weight above.

Closing Reflection

Theater thrives on spectacle, and rigging makes much of that spectacle possible. Yet the most important part of rigging is the silence — the fact that audiences never notice it because it does exactly what it should.

The weight above us deserves the same deliberate attention we give to cues and choreography. Not because it changes every night, but because it rarely changes at all. And in that stillness, problems can hide until the day they can’t be ignored.