One Industry, Five Different Jobs: TV vs. Theater vs. Festivals vs. Circus vs. Live Events

People ask me sometimes what I do for work and I tell them I work in live event production and they nod in a way that suggests they have formed a picture in their head, and the picture is usually one of two things: either a concert with a very large lighting rig, or a wedding with a very large floral arrangement. Both of those exist within this industry and I have worked adjacent to both of them and neither of them fully captures what I'm talking about, which is part of why I started this blog.

The broader truth is that "live event production" is not one job. It is a family of jobs that share DNA and vocabulary and a certain baseline tolerance for chaos, but which are culturally and operationally distinct in ways that matter enormously when you're actually doing the work. I have worked in most of these worlds — television, theater, festival, circus, live events — and moving between them requires a kind of code-switching that took me years to get comfortable with.

Let me map them for you.

**Television Production.**

Television has the most codified structure of any production environment I've worked in, and I mean that as a compliment. The union jurisdictions are clear. The call sheet is dense with information. The hierarchy is explicit and mostly respected. Everyone knows their lane and the lanes are enforced, sometimes aggressively — on a union television set, there are specific things that specific crafts do and you do not do those things if you are not in that craft, full stop, regardless of whether you technically know how. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the accumulated wisdom of an industry that learned through painful experience what happens when everyone tries to do everything.

The pace is different from live events in a way that surprises people when they cross over for the first time. Television moves slowly by live event standards — hours of setup for minutes of camera time, meticulous attention to details that a live audience would never notice, a kind of precision that is genuinely impressive and also, if you are used to festival pace, occasionally maddening. I have worked on CSI, SWAT, the Golden Globes, the Oscars Red Carpet. These are different animals from each other but they share the DNA of the union television set: structured, precise, slow by some standards, and absolutely unforgiving of the person who doesn't know the rules.

The money is usually better. The craft services are usually better. The porta-potties are usually better. These things matter on a long call.

**Regional Theater.**

Theater was where I started and it will always feel like home in the specific way that the place you learned a thing feels like home — slightly complicated, deeply familiar, full of memories of doing it wrong. Regional theater runs on a combination of union stagecraft and genuine love for the work, because nobody goes into regional theater because the money is extraordinary. You go because you care about the craft.

The technical demands of theater are their own world. Repertory houses running multiple shows in rotation are a particular kind of operational puzzle — you are storing multiple shows' worth of scenery and props and flying hardware and you are switching between them on an aggressive schedule, and you know this building, this fly system, this loading dock, this quirky counterweight arbor that always sticks on the third leg, with an intimacy that you never develop with a venue you're visiting once for a load-in. Theater is the discipline that taught me to read a ground plan, to understand sightlines, to think about the audience's experience from every seat in the house. That's knowledge I carry into every other context I work in.

The pace is deliberate. Tech rehearsals are long and slow and occasionally theological in their intensity. The relationship between the technical departments and the artistic team is closer and more collaborative than in most other production contexts — in theater the director is in the room with you, often for weeks, and the show changes around you as it gets made. You are not executing a finished vision. You are part of making the vision.

**Festival Production.**

Festival production is where most of my recent life has lived and it is, genuinely, its own entire civilization. The scale ranges from intimate regional gatherings with a few hundred attendees to Burning Man, which is a temporary city of eighty thousand people built in a desert and struck in two weeks, and which has its own infrastructure, its own culture, its own operational logic that has almost nothing in common with a theater call and only passing resemblance to a television set.

Festival production moves fast and improvises constantly. You are often building in environments that are actively hostile — desert heat, rain, wind, mud, dust that gets into everything including gear that was not designed to have dust get into it. The union rules that govern a Hollywood set often do not apply, which means everyone can do more things, which is both liberating and occasionally chaotic. The hierarchy is looser. The communication is more lateral. The vibe — and I use that word deliberately — is a factor in a way that it simply isn't on a television set.

I have done transportation with Do Lab at Lightning in a Bottle, which involves moving an extraordinary amount of infrastructure across a festival site with the specific logic of an operation that has done this many times and knows exactly how. I have lead-rigged for Lucent Dossier's full aerial opera installation at Burning Man, which is building a sophisticated performance rig in the middle of a desert during a windstorm while also being part of a community and a culture and an event that is unlike anything else on earth. These are the same job title and they are completely different experiences.

The money is more variable than television. The experience is, for certain kinds of people — and I am clearly one of them — irreplaceable.

**Circus and Aerial.**

Circus production is a niche within a niche and I love it with my whole chest. The technical demands of rigging for aerial performance are specific and serious — you are building systems that human bodies will fly through, and the margin for error is not a margin at all, it is zero, because physics does not negotiate. I apprenticed with Icarus Rigging in LA and have been doing aerial rigging in various contexts since. I perform aerial myself. Being on both sides of the rope — the rigger who builds the system and the performer who flies it — gives me a perspective on aerial safety culture that is, I would argue, fairly rare.

Circus production also tends to happen in unusual spaces. A big top tent in a parking lot. A theater that wasn't designed for aerial and requires creative solutions to put a point where you need one. A festival stage with a truss system that was specified for lighting and is now being asked to do something more interesting. The problem-solving that circus demands is some of the most satisfying technical work I do.

**The World of "Live Events."**

This is the catch-all: corporate events, galas, product launches, award shows, conferences, immersive experiences, pop-ups, brand activations. It is the largest sector of the industry by volume and it is the one that gets the least romantic treatment, which is fine, because it is not always romantic. It is, however, consistently interesting in a problem-solving sense, because corporate and brand clients often want things that have never been built before — not for artistic reasons but because the brief says "create an unforgettable experience" and someone has to figure out what that means in a ballroom in four hours.

I've worked the Oscars Red Carpet, which is the live events world colliding with the television world in a very particular way. I've worked WWE RAW, which is its own genre entirely — live event production meets television production meets professional wrestling meets an audience that is very much part of the show. Every context has its own rules and its own culture and its own version of what "professional" means.

The skill that all of it requires, underneath everything else, is adaptability. The ability to walk into a new context, read it quickly, understand which rules apply and which don't, and do good work within whatever structure you find. That's the job. In all five worlds and all the spaces between them.

That's always the job.

— Dots

"My Resume Doesn't Make Sense and That's the Point"

Someone asked me once to walk them through my career trajectory. This was at a party, which was already a mistake — production people do not give short answers about anything — but I took a breath and I started: Americorps in Brooklyn, theater in New England, campaign trail in Florida, rigging apprenticeship in LA under Icarus Rigging, clown training under Cirque du Soleil's former head clown, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, CSI, SWAT, Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Burning Man lead rigger for a full circus aerial opera, festival circuit up and down the west coast, Cowboy Carter Tour build, Do Lab's transport team, full time van life, and now this blog.

By the time I got to the part about the bearded lady character with Crash Alchemy at SXSW, the person I was talking to had the look of someone trying to determine if I was making the whole thing up. I was not making any of it up. This is just what a production career looks like if you follow it honestly rather than trying to make it look like something that fits in a LinkedIn headline.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're coming up: there is no ladder. There's a jungle gym, and about half the handholds are missing, and the whole structure is slightly on fire, and you will absolutely love it once you stop expecting it to make sense.

A traditional career has a shape. You start somewhere, you move up, you accrue titles and salary bands and a 401k contribution that someone will explain to you at an orientation that you're too tired to absorb. That's not this. In production, what you accrue is skill, reputation, and a truly staggering number of phone numbers. The trajectory is lateral as often as it is vertical. Some years I've made great money doing television work on Hollywood union calls. Some years I've been the weirdo in a wig doing performance at a festival for a percentage of the gate and a wristband. Both of those years taught me things the other couldn't.

The work is not one thing. It is never one thing. It is rigging in the morning and scenic carpentry in the afternoon and performing at night and driving through the desert at 3am because load-out went long and you've got another call in a different state in eleven hours. It is knowing how to read a load rating and also how to read a room. It is understanding the union rules on a television set and also understanding that there are no union rules at a festival and knowing which set of instincts to apply where.

What holds all of it together is not a job title. It's a set of skills that transfer, and a reputation for showing up and figuring it out, and knowing enough people who will answer the phone when you call. That's the whole career. That's what twenty years of it looks like.

I'm writing this blog partly because I think there are people out there who are doing this work or trying to get into it and they're confused about why nobody seems to have a clean story about how they got here. And the answer is that the clean story is a lie. The real story looks like mine — weird, sprawling, occasionally baffling from the outside, completely legible if you understand the logic of a life that follows the work.

The logic, if it helps, is this: do the thing you're good at and curious about. Do it somewhere slightly bigger and slightly harder than what you did before. Do it with people who are better than you so you can figure out what better looks like. Do not say no to a gig because you don't know exactly what you're doing yet — figure it out and be honest about what you know and don't know, and most of the time that will be enough. Take care of your body, because this industry will use it up if you let it. And never, under any circumstances, complain about the catering within earshot of the catering coordinator.

The resume doesn't make sense because it was never meant to. It was meant to describe a life that moved toward the work, every time, without apology. That's all it is. That's enough.

— Dots