Bill Sapsis has been at the forefront of rigging for the past 28 years. His company, Sapsis Rigging, is one of the leading rigging companies in our industry, and he’s spent countless hours helping develop programs that make rigging safer and easier.
He is also the organizer behind the Long Reach Long Riders benefiting Behind the Scenes. The motorcycle tour is a fundraiser to help temporarily disabled industry professionals meet their financial obligations. As if that’s not enough, Sapsis is also the organizer of the North American Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference, the first of which was held in New York City in 2008.
In this month’s PLSN interview, Sapsis was kind enough to share his thoughts on everything rigging.
PLSN: According to our crack team of researchers, you’ve been involved in the field of rigging since the early 1980s, is that right?
Bill Sapsis: The company was started in 1981.
How did you get started?
I kicked around as a freelance guy for about 10 years. I worked all over the country — spent a fair amount of time on Broadway, as a flyman and I spent a lot of time in the Broadway shops as a welder. After doing that for 10 years, I kind of gravitated towards rigging. That was the job that caught my interest the most.
When you started your company, what types of jobs were you doing?
When I first started my rigging company, the first thing we did was build scenery. [Laughs]. I don’t know why or how it happened, but we were asked to build scenery for a show here in Philadelphia and we did. We continued to combine rigging installations and scenery for shows for about 10 years.
What made you switch to rigging only?
Building scenery just became too difficult to earn a living; then it became more about producing and rigging. For example, in the late 1980s, we started producing fashion shows. We would provide everything except the models. I was Calvin Klein’s technical director for about four years. While there was a great need for rigging, we were there, and so we took on the entire production.
Did your background in Broadway help?
It helped immensely.
When you got involved in rigging, there weren’t as many professionals in the field. Now we’ve seen lots of changes in that field due to the Entertainment Services & Technology Association (ESTA), the Entertainment Technician Certification Program (ETCP), and the ESTA Foundation. How did you deal with it, back then?
To be honest, from a safety standpoint, we didn’t. We did the best we could without any direction, without any understanding of official safety procedures. Because there weren’t any. When I first started out in the 1980s, nobody wore a harness. If you wore a harness on a job they laughed you right off the set. Then people started to get hurt. Sadly some even got killed, and harnesses were a concept that people started to accept. But we didn’t have full body harnesses in those days. Most of us were rock climbers in one form or another and we had climbing harnesses, so we wore those. It wasn’t until later, when the studies came out, that we realized how bad of an idea that was.
You were involved in the early phases of the rigging standards we see today, as well as the ETCP certifications that have gained traction in the past few years.
I was there early on.
What do you see as your role in working with ESTA and ETCP? Does your experience give you insight and help you craft some of those guidelines?
Our experiences help us craft and formulate the programs. The role for the senior members in our industry — I guess I’m approaching that — is to pass our knowledge down, and not only make it safer for everybody that works in our industry, but to make it easier too. We try to give everyone a better understanding of how to go about doing certain things we do.
What was the single most important development that allows you to do that?
I think it’s the ETCP. I think ETCP has changed the way the industry looks at rigging; the way the industry looks at safety; and the way the industry looks at training. The whole industry became much more aware — of what’s needed, what’s required, and what should happen — because of the ETCP.
What’s the biggest benefit?
ETCP has raised the level of awareness, and, because of ETCP, you have people clamoring for training and to take the exam. They may have been doing this for the past 20 years, but they’ve been doing it by the seat of their pants. In some cases, they’re not sure if they are right or not, and they’re looking for training and reassurance. That training is raising the bar for everyone.
In terms of technology, what has changed that has allowed you to do what you do better than before?
Well, the technology has turned the corner from manually operated systems into motorized systems. That’s the big change. From that flows everything else. Because we can use motorized systems, we can do things much faster, we can control them better and we can do them more frequently, which places a higher level of attention to detail on the people who are working these systems.
Can you give us a then-and-now example?
Look at Phantom of the Opera. In early productions, the falling chandelier was a manually operated system. When the version of the production came out in the 1990s, it was motorized, but the motorization was not as sophisticated as it is today. If you look at the production in Las Vegas, for example, there are people screaming when that chandelier comes down. There are very few people who go to see Phantom who don’t know the chandelier is going to fall. Still, when it happens, it flips them out and they’re shrieking and ducking. That’s what it’s all about. And we can do that because of the sophistication and the level of complexity in that rig.
Would it be safe to say that a competent rigging designer’s job is to be able to discern what’s out there in the market and apply it to a particular production? Are you, at times, surprised by some of the new technology?
We’re not looking at new products as much as new levels of sophistication. Gravity still does what gravity does, and we’re still talking about machines, ultimately. What surprises and excites me is the level of control. There are winches out there being used, particularly on movie shoots, that are moving at 5,000 feet per minute.
That’s hard to imagine.
Yeah. Just as a comparison, we’ve run some tests, and a human can pull a counterweight operating line at a maximum speed of 400 feet per minute. The control systems that are now available to use — like I said a lot of them have been designed for the movies — are being brought into the theatre business. It has become more and more available, and as it becomes more available it becomes more utilized.
With all the changes you’ve seen in our industry, what would you say to an aspiring stagehand that wants to take up rigging as a career?
It’s not about what you’ve done; it’s about how you’ve done it. You could’ve worked on the top tour in the world, but if you didn’t develop good work habits, or you didn’t develop the ability to present yourself well, you’re still gong to have a problem getting a job. Rigging is a combination of many skills — some of them physical, some of them you learn through education and experience — but you also bring your personality to it.
With all the work you’ve done with ESTA and ETCP, and, of course, the success you’ve achieved in business, where do you want to be as you move forward?
Well, in about 10 years, I’d like to be sitting outside my house in Vermont, fishing in the pond. [Laughs]. But I suspect I’ll still be working with ETCP and ESTA. As the industry and equipment advances, we’ll still need people to write standards for the safe use and operation of that stuff. This is an ongoing program that has no end game.
