"We climb up fifty-five, sixty feet in the air, we walk out on four inch steel beams, we lower our ropes and they attach chains to the end of our ropes, we haul up the chain, (which gets very heavy by the time you've got fifty-five feet of chain in the air), we wrap the steel around the beam so it's fastened properly and will hold a lot of weight so it all hangs well and nothing falls on anybody."
That's what 'up' riggers do. Their work is high above the crowd and without them the show simply would not go on. Traditionally, like many technical jobs in staging, up riggers were men. In fact, many guys thought that up-rigging was not a woman's kind of job because women just weren't capable of doing it. Wrong. And Gina Dalmas and Stephanie "Otis" Renegar are proof of that.
Both women were part of the local crew call at the Walnut Creek Pavilion in Raleigh, North Carolina. According to Stephanie, "the biggest obstacle that both of us had was being able to do it in the first place because nobody thought we could handle it." Says Otis, "when I expressed interest in the job the stage manager said, 'you're a girl, what are you thinking?' A lot of this for me got to be a struggle because all the guys were like, 'you can't do this, you're a girl, you can't do this' so for me it became very personal. I almost gave up, I just got too much shit, but I just said 'I've got to do this. When there's a guy saying you can't do that, I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to mess up and it's going to be right."
According to Lilith Fair's Head Rigger, Kevin McCloy, he's only ever worked with one other female up-rigger. So how did Otis and Gina do, did they cut it? "I thought the whole rigging department was excellent. Their team showed no attitude towards gender and were concerned simply with the professionalism of their work. Specifically, with Otis and Gina, I found it refreshing to work with two young professionals who were experienced, aware, and ready to rig. It's good to work with a rigging crew who are heads up and enthusiastic"
"There's a lot of knowledge in it, you've got to know exactly what you're doing. You want to be up there with a balanced mind and a balanced body. You're up really high, there's always the possibility of falling everywhere you go. You can't be complacent, ever.
"Everybody does look up to riggers, they're a little bit higher up on the totem pole. We started out as stage hands, but we wanted to be riggers because they're the best you can be in this business."
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