To Tracy Nunnally, rigging is like dancing. While the owner and president of Hall Associates Flying Effects—a special effects rigging company that he joined in 2000 and then bought in 2005—can program a motor to move fluidly, Nunnally still senses a cold, mechanical feel to the effect. “But if you get an operator who is pulling on a rope and interfacing with an artist who is on stage, then they are kind of like dance partners,” says the rigger. Suddenly, the action is more organic, born from the human connection, as opposed to one person trying to dance with a machine. “For me, the function needs to follow the form.”
Nunnally recently met with a director for an upcoming show, and the director launched into full-on tech talk about what kind of system he thought might work. The experienced rigger put a stop to that quickly. “Just tell me what you want to see,” Nunnally said, explaining that he’ll worry about the nuts and bolts after he learns about the story. The director was pleasantly dumbfounded, confessing that Nunnally was the first technical person he’s talked to in a long time who cares about the story. “Whether it’s motors, whether it’s hydraulics, whether it’s pneumatics, whether there’s fourteen guys out in the alley, pulling on a rope, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “What’s important is the story on the stage, and then we let the machinery follow the story.” Nunnally is well-versed in how machinery—theatre automation, motion control, rigging, pyrotechnics, special effects, and CADD—can best help tell a story.
Involved with theatre his whole life, Nunnally is one of the “fortunate people in our business who’s never had to do anything else,” he admits. Under the advice of his parents, as so many do, he researched other career options and studied computer science as well as theatre in college. But he left behind skid marks when he raced from the math to the theatre department the moment he realized he could have an actual career in theatre. Comfortable from a young age with ropes, rock climbing, rappelling, and zip lining—“I was doing zip lines before it was cool to do zip lines”—in the mountains of northern Georgia, Nunnally was tasked with the rigging duties in the theatre department during his undergraduate years at LaGrange College. While everyone was freaking out about how to fly a person during his junior year, he was cool as could be: “Guys, we’re not on a rock face; we’re not in a thunderstorm; we’re not fighting rattlesnakes. All we’ve got to do is put this girl in a bird outfit and string her up with some wires.” Such a task fell naturally into his sphere of skills, and he has since flown countless individuals.
For a recent production of Charlotte’s Web at Western Michigan University, Nunnally trained the actress playing Charlotte on how to use a special somersault harness in order to act like a spider. He gave her the harness, set up a temporary rig, and told the technical director to let her practice in the harness for 30 minutes three to four times a week. Since Nunnally would only have a few days to work with her, she needed to learn how to be a spider beforehand. After she got the harness work down, Nunnally set up a spinner trolley system, which allows three separate operators to control lift, travel, and spin of a performer, giving them numerous axes with which to work. “Then it was just a case of interfacing the operators with her work, which was a little clunky to begin with,” he admits. “But you can imagine two people meeting for the first time, trying to do the foxtrot; it’s going to be a little rocky for the first few days, and then they’ll eventually fall into sync.” And they did. She climbed up and down walls and across ceilings, hanging upside down from her thread of “web” so naturally that it surpassed all the director’s expectations.
One of his favorite flights was from a Dayton Contemporary Dance Company production in 2002 called Beating Of Wings, which told the story of the Wright brothers and their attempts to fly, honoring the centennial celebration of their first flight. One of the dancers represented the aircraft, and during the chorus, in a tight lighting special, she would try to leave the ground, going up on her tip-toes and then not make it. For the final chorus, Nunnally carefully lowered wires on either side of the tight special. The other dancers covertly hooked her in. When the music swelled and she tried to leave the ground, Nunnally pulled her up very slowly until finally her toes broke away from the stage. “There was maybe just a half an inch of air under that toe,” he reminisces, “but once it was clear to the audience that she was in the air, to hear 2,000 people collectively inhale all at once, to me just symbolized what it was like when those guys first got that plane off the ground.” While the flight wasn’t incredibly challenging, it’s still one of his most treasured moments.
Hanging By A Moment
As a full-time professor at Northern Illinois University, Nunnally measures his life by similar moments. “I love to witness those moments when students suddenly realize that they actually know what they’re doing,” he says, “and it’s almost like that moment when the dancer came off the floor for the Wright brothers piece. Some of them are that dramatic.” Nunnally once took one of his grad students to do an inspection of Curtains on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where the student spent a full day among arguably the top professionals of the country’s theatre industry. The wizened professor asked the student if he had seen or heard anything that was confusing or above his skill level. Shocked, the student replied he had not. “And I said, ‘How does that make you feel?’ And he got this big smile across his face, and he said, ‘Employable,’” the rigger recalls. The student now works for Nunnally.
The professional educator will share his expertise at this year’s LDInnovation & Technology Conference, running the Tracy Nunnally Rigging School, which offers four sessions that carry ETCP renewal credits. “They’re intended for all skill levels, from grizzled, old professionals down to the wet-behind-the-ears high school student,” he says. Nunnally has had quite the success with these courses in years past where 50-year-old IATSE riggers admitted after the class that they had never thought to use a bridle that way before or that they came just for the renewal credit but actually learned something new. Nunnally stresses the importance to not only refresh skills, but to also continue along the path of standards.
As audiences come to expect more and shows grow accordingly, incorporating hundreds of lighting instruments, more special effects, moving set pieces, flying performers, shifting screens, articulating truss, and of course, greater loads, the industry cannot lose sight of safety. A voting member of the ANSI-accredited PLASA Technical Standards Program Rigging Working Group, Nunnally believes standards are important, but they should not become too restrictive. “We have to take our steps very carefully in the future to make sure that we don’t strangle the art for the sake of the standard, but the standard needs to be there for the sake of the art,” he says. “It’s a two-sided coin. We’ve got to just walk the edge of that coin very carefully as the shepherds of the industry.”
Nunnally does not wish to stamp out imagination. In fact, he enjoys working with directors who are a little crazy as he’s not one to shy away from a challenge. He won’t say no to the director who wants a giant eagle with a 60' wingspan to fly out of the sky, swooping down over the audience from where its talons pluck up a circus performer to then set him on stage. “It’s the things where other folks just run from the room, screaming, ‘No, no, no. I don’t even want to hear this,'” he says. “Those are the ones where we’re like, ‘Yeah, we can do that. That’s easy.'”
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