CMU School of Drama


Monday, September 21, 2015

Q&A With Jonathan Deull | Principles And Practices Of Aerial Rigging

LDI content from Live Design: Jonathan Deull has been a student of aerial performer rigging since 1996 when his daughter began performing as a circus aerialist at the age of seven. He has designed and executed aerial circus and acrobatic rigging both in the U.S. and internationally, and is the author of the chapter on rigging in Aerial Dance, by Jayne Bernasconi and Nancy Smith.

1 comment:

Kimberly McSweeney said...

This is a super interesting new perspective to hear from in the front of rigging. I had never really examined the art of aerial and entertainment rigging, and most of Jonathan’s points seem to be intuitive, but also important to reiterate in his practice. Something that I had realized but not connected fully to the concept of aerial rigging is dynamic and shock loads that occur in the routines pretty typically. I know that shock loading a system can be detrimental in classic static rigging, but the fact that these riggers handle dynamic and shock loads on the regular makes me curious to how often the system needs to be changed out or what hardware variations they have from static rigging. I also like the creativity aspect of aerial rigging, because problem solving is already pretty prevalent in standard rigging, but the aerial riggers have to get extra creative to solve problems of dynamic weights and interesting configurations.