The Unwritten Rules (Every Production Worker Knows These. Now You Do Too.)

Every profession has them — the things that are never in any manual, never covered in any orientation, never explained by anyone directly, that you are nonetheless expected to know and follow. Law firms have them. Restaurant kitchens have them in abundance. Live event production has approximately ten thousand of them, accumulated over decades of collective experience, enforced by nothing except the social consequences of being the person who didn't know.

I'm going to give you some of them. Not all of them — that would take a book, and I'm not writing the book yet — but enough to get you through your first several calls without becoming a story someone tells at load-out about the new person.

**You are always early or you are late. There is no on time.**

Call time is not the time you walk through the door. Call time is the time you are in position, tools in hand, ready to work. Walking through the door at call time means you are already behind, because you still need to find the production office, sign in, get your credentials, find your department, get your assignment, and actually get to the place where work happens. In the time it takes you to do all of that, the people who showed up fifteen minutes early are already working. Add fifteen minutes to every call time you are given, treat that as your actual call time, and you will never be the person the department head is looking for when the day starts.

**You eat when you can, not when you want.**

On a long call, the opportunity to eat will present itself at unpredictable moments and disappear just as unpredictably. When there is food and you have a moment, you eat. You do not wait for a better moment. You do not decide you'll eat later. You eat now, because later the production will need something and the meal break will slide and you will discover at 9pm that the last time you ate was at 10am and you still have three hours of load-out ahead of you. Eat when you can. It is not a complicated rule but it takes new people a while to genuinely internalize.

**The truck is Tetris and Tetris is serious.**

The way gear gets packed into a truck is not random and it is not casual. It is a specific arrangement based on load order — the last thing you need comes off the truck first, which means it goes in the truck last. The weight distribution matters for the drive. The way cases are stacked matters for whether they arrive intact. The person packing the truck has a system and that system exists for reasons that are not always immediately obvious but are always real. Do not rearrange someone else's truck pack unless you are certain you understand the logic of what you're disrupting. When in doubt, ask before you touch.

**The show does not know it is behind schedule.**

The show goes up when it goes up. The audience does not experience the load-in. They experience the show, and the show either happens or it doesn't, and everything between the start of load-in and the moment doors open is in service of making it happen. When the schedule slips — and the schedule always slips — the response is not panic and it is not complaint. The response is recalibration. What can we cut? What can we compress? What needs to happen in what order to still get to a show? The people who are useful in a behind-schedule situation are asking those questions. The people who are not useful are explaining why it isn't their fault that things are behind.

**Cable has a right way and a wrong way.**

Coiling cable is a skill. Over-under coiling — the technique that keeps cable from developing memory and tangling — takes about five minutes to learn and is immediately obvious whether someone knows it or not. If you are new and you don't know how to over-under coil cable, learn before your first call. Watch a video. Practice on your own headphone cord. Then on a call, when you are asked to wrap cable, do it correctly. The alternative is that you become known as the person who returns tangled cable, and in a world where people's gear is their livelihood, that reputation takes a while to recover from.

**Everything goes back where it came from.**

At the end of a call, every piece of gear returns to its case. Every case goes back on the truck. Every tool goes back in the toolbox. Every piece of spike tape comes up off the floor. The venue gets left the way you found it or better. This discipline is not just politeness — it is the operational foundation of the next call, wherever that is, whenever that is. When something is not where it's supposed to be, it costs time to find it, and time on a call costs money, and that money comes out of someone's hide, and it is usually not the hide of the person who left the thing in the wrong place.

**Read the room. Then read it again.**

Production environments have emotional weather and the weather changes fast. A call that started relaxed can tighten in twenty minutes when a problem surfaces. The experienced production worker is always reading the room — is the department head's jaw set in a particular way? Is the PM making a lot of phone calls? Is the stage manager's voice doing the thing where it's very calm in a way that means she is managing something that is not very calm? These are signals. They tell you to pick up the pace, or to ask if there's something you can help with, or to stay out of the way and let the people with the information handle the situation.

Nobody will explain this to you. You learn to read it or you don't, and the people who do become indispensable and the people who don't always seem slightly out of sync with what the day actually needs.

**Take care of the crew around you.**

This is the one I care about most and the one that gets talked about least. Long calls are hard on bodies. They are hard on morale. The people around you are dealing with the same twelve-hour day you are, plus whatever they brought to it from their personal lives and their previous calls and everything else. A person who brings water to their department without being asked, who notices when someone is flagging and picks up their slack without comment, who makes the quiet human gestures that make a long day survivable — that person is worth more to me than someone with twice the technical skills and none of the situational awareness.

The technical skills are learnable. The awareness of the humans around you — that one you choose. Choose it. It makes this whole strange, beautiful industry better.

— Dots

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*That wraps up "What Even Is This Job?" month. Starting next week we go deep on specifics — the festival circuit, what it means to actually work it, and what Do Lab's operation at Lightning in a Bottle taught me about how good festival production runs. See you Monday.*

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*THE GRUNT is written by Dottie M. Soldati (they/them). Find them at soldati.rocks.*

The Anatomy of a Load-In (Or: How an Empty Room Becomes a Show)

Picture an empty room. Could be a theater, could be a festival stage, could be a convention center ballroom that smells aggressively of the previous convention. Doesn't matter. It's empty, it's yours for a finite window of time, and somewhere in the near future, people are going to walk into this room expecting to experience something. Your job — our job — is to build that experience from nothing, in that window, with the crew and equipment and budget you have been given, which is never quite the crew or equipment or budget you would have asked for in an ideal world because the ideal world does not book shows.

This is the load-in. This is the fundamental unit of live event production. Everything else — the rider, the call sheet, the advance work, the production meetings — is in service of this moment: the window in which a room gets transformed. I have been doing load-ins for twenty years, across venues ranging from a converted warehouse in East LA where the loading dock was a ramp that gave every road case its own opinion about physics, to the Oscars Red Carpet, which has its own particular brand of controlled chaos that I will absolutely tell you about at some point. The anatomy is more or less the same every time. Let me walk you through it.

**Before anyone touches a case: the advance.**

The load-in starts before the load-in. It starts in the production meetings and the phone calls and the site visits, sometimes weeks out, in which the production team figures out what they're walking into before they walk into it. Ceiling height. Power availability. Load-bearing capacity of the floor and the fly system if there is one. Where the loading dock is and whether a 53-foot trailer can actually back into it or whether the venue's optimistic self-description of "truck accessible" means something more creative is required. What the union jurisdiction is and what that means for who can touch what.

The production manager advances the show. The department heads advance their departments. By the time the crew shows up on load-in day, the people running the call should already know exactly what they're walking into, which is to say they have done everything possible to eliminate surprises, knowing full well that there will still be surprises. The advance is how you make sure the surprises are merely annoying and not catastrophic.

**The order of operations.**

Load-in has a sequence, and the sequence matters, and deviating from it without understanding why the sequence exists is how you end up with lighting hung before the audio snake is run, which means you have to move some of the lighting to run the audio snake, which means you're doing things twice, which means you're now behind, which means someone is making a phone call they don't want to make about whether the show goes up on time. Here is the basic sequence, understanding that every show deviates from it in some way and the entire skill of production is in knowing when you can deviate and when you cannot:

*Structure first.* Stage, deck, risers, platforms — anything architectural goes in before anything else, because everything else sits on top of it or hangs from it. You cannot hang a lighting rig from a truss that hasn't been flown yet. You cannot run cable across a stage that hasn't been built. Structure is the skeleton and everything else is meat, which is a slightly grim way to think about it but accurate.

*Rigging second.* If anything is going above the deck — truss, motors, chain hoists, audio hangs, scenic elements — rigging happens early, because once the stage is full of people and equipment, access to the roof gets complicated and slow. This is my world and I will have a great deal more to say about it in a future post, but for now: everything that flies gets figured out before anything that rolls gets rolled into position.

*Power third.* Distro runs, feeder cable, generator connections if the venue power isn't sufficient, which it often isn't. Power goes in before the stuff that needs power, which seems obvious but is the source of a remarkable number of delays when the sequencing breaks down. You need to know where the power lives before you know where the gear lives.

*Audio and lighting.* Roughly parallel, often with some creative negotiation about whose cable needs to be where, because audio and lighting both have a lot of cable and cable has opinions about space. Good departments communicate. Less good departments discover each other's opinions at the exact worst moment.

*Video, if applicable.* LED walls, projection, screens — these tend to go in later because they're sensitive to other things happening around them and because the picture of what the show looks like visually often sharpens late in the process. This varies enormously by show.

*Scenic.* Set pieces, props, dressing — the stuff that makes the space look like the thing it's supposed to look like. Scenic often happens in layers, with big structural elements early and dressing late.

*Tech.* Once everything is physically in place, you tech the show. You test everything. You find the things that don't work and you fix them. You adjust. You compromise. You make the version of the vision that is achievable in the time and space and budget available. This is where the production manager earns every dollar they have been paid and then some.

*Doors.* At some point, doors open and the audience comes in and the whole complicated machine becomes invisible and the only thing that exists is the show. That's the goal. That's always the goal. You build something complex enough to disappear.

**The thing about time.**

Every load-in is a negotiation with time, and time is always winning. The window is always shorter than you want and the scope is always slightly larger than what fits comfortably in the window, and the entire practice of production is learning to do more with less of both. The people who are good at this — really good — have an internal clock that is always running, that is always doing the math between what's done and what's left and how much time remains, and that math is always running in the background behind every other decision they make during a call.

When you see an experienced production worker look at a space and say "yeah, we can do this" or "we're going to need to cut something" — that's the clock talking. It's calibrated by years of load-ins, by every time they were right and every time they were wrong and what they learned each time. You can't teach it out of a book. You can only get it by doing the load-ins, over and over, until your body knows what your brain is still trying to calculate.

That's the anatomy. Come back Wednesday and we'll talk about the document that holds the whole thing together.

— Dots

"A Civilian's Guide to Not Driving Your Production Crew Insane"

I want to be very clear before we begin that I love the people who hire us. Clients, venue managers, artists, coordinators, festival directors — by and large, these are creative, passionate humans who are trying to make something happen and are genuinely grateful that someone with a tool belt showed up to make it possible. I love them. They are the reason any of this exists.

And they will also, without meaning to, absolutely lose their minds if we do not give them some basic vocabulary and operating procedures. What follows is a public service.

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**Learn the word "call."**

The call is when you are expected to be in the building and functional. Not in the parking lot. Not in the lobby texting that you're almost there. In the building and functional. When someone asks what your call time is, they are asking for this information. When you are not there at your call time, you have made a choice, and that choice has consequences that ripple outward from you through the entire schedule like a pebble in a very stressed-out pond.

**"Spike it" is not a football term.**

When someone asks you to spike something, they want you to mark its position on the floor with tape. This is important. The spike tape is how we know where the thing goes. Without the spike tape we are all just guessing, and guessing on a dark stage with a two-hour load-in window is an experience I would not recommend to anyone.

**The rider is not a suggestion.**

The rider is the technical and hospitality document that specifies exactly what an artist or production requires to perform. It has been written by people who have done this many times and learned the hard way what happens when specific things are not in place. When the rider says the stage monitors need to be a particular brand, that is not the artist being difficult. That is the artist having had a previous experience with a different brand that went badly in a way that affected a performance in front of thousands of people. Read the rider. Honor the rider. If you cannot honor the rider, have that conversation in advance with enough time to actually solve it, and not at sound check.

**The production manager is not the enemy.**

I know they seem like they're telling you no about everything. They are telling you no about some things because those things will break the show, the budget, the timeline, or a federal regulation. The production manager's entire job is to hold about four hundred variables in tension simultaneously and make sure none of them drops. When they tell you they can't add a follow spot at 6pm for an 8pm show, they are not being arbitrary. They are doing math that involves things you are not currently aware of. Trust the math.

**"Practical" means it actually works.**

In scenic and lighting design, a practical element is one that actually does the thing it appears to do — a lamp that is a lamp and not a lamp-shaped prop, a door that opens and not a door-shaped flat. This distinction matters deeply and in specific ways that become apparent at the worst possible moment if you haven't confirmed it in advance.

**Load-in and load-out are different animals.**

Load-in is exciting. You're building something. There's coffee, there's momentum, the vision is becoming real. Load-out is the thing that happens after the show, when the vision has been real for several hours and everyone is exhausted and the venue wants you out in ninety minutes and it's midnight and somebody can't find the road case that the expensive piece of gear lives in. Be kind to the crew at load-out. Be patient. This is the job too.

**"It's giving" is not a technical note.**

I'm just saying. If you want more of something, say more of what. If you want less, say less of what. We are not mind readers. We are riggers and carpenters and electricians and we are very good at solving specific problems with specific tools, but we cannot solve the problem of vibes. Tell us what you want the thing to do and we will make it do that. This is the deal.

**House is not your house.**

"The house" refers to the audience area of a venue, and "house lights" are the lights that illuminate it. When someone says "take it to house," they mean bring the lights up in the audience area. They do not mean illuminate the building in which they personally reside. I have never had to explain this to someone twice, but I have had to explain it once, and once was memorable.

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There are more of these — there are always more — but this is enough for one week. The point is not that civilians are bad. The point is that every industry has a language, and the faster you learn the language, the faster you become someone that the crew is glad to see, instead of someone that the crew is politely managing. We want to be glad to see you. We really do. Come talk to us. Bring us coffee. And for the love of everything, read the rider.

— Dots

Why This Exists (And Why Nobody Else Is Doing It)

Let me tell you something that took me about fifteen years in this industry to fully accept, which is that nobody is coming to explain this job to anybody. No one is going to sit you down, pour you a cup of whatever's left in the green room and walk you through how any of this actually works. You will learn it by doing it wrong, repeatedly, in front of people who are too busy to stop and tell you that you're doing it wrong, until one day you stop doing it wrong and nobody mentions it because there's already seventeen other things happening and the artist is forty minutes out and where the hell is catering.

That's the job. That's always been the job. And I wouldn't trade it for anything, which is either a sign of genuine passion or something a therapist might want to look at more closely.

I've been doing this for twenty years. Theater, film, festivals, circus, aerial, rigging, fabrication, scenic build, stagehand work, production management — you name it, I've hauled it, hung it, built it, or performed on top of it. I've worked Burning Man and I've worked the Golden Globes. I've rigged circus aerials in the Nevada desert and I've rigged the Oscars Red Carpet. I've done transportation with Do Lab at Lightning in a Bottle, which is its own kind of beautiful chaos, and I've done wardrobe on the Cowboy Carter Tour build, which is an entirely different kind of beautiful chaos, and what connects them is that in both cases you show up on time, you figure out what's broken before anyone else notices it's broken, and you do not complain about the catering within earshot of the catering coordinator.

And in all that time — twenty years, hundreds of gigs, thousands of load-ins — I have never once found a blog, a column, a newsletter, a Substack, a podcast, a zine, a sticky note, or a napkin drawing that explained what this work actually is from the inside. There are books about event planning. There are Instagram accounts about stage lighting. There are entire subreddits dedicated to touring sound. But the lived experience of being the person who shows up at 6am to a venue that isn't ready and figures it out anyway, with the team you have and the budget you were given and the rider that nobody read? That's just oral tradition and scar tissue.

So that's what this is. The Grunt is a blog about live event production written by someone who is actively, presently, still-doing-it a grunt. I'm not writing this from a corner office. I'm writing this from a van. Literally. I live in a van, which I converted myself, which is an apt metaphor for how I approach most things.

We're going to talk about rigging — what it actually means, what it takes to do it safely, and why the person holding the rope matters more than anyone in a meeting room will ever admit. We're going to talk about festival logistics and tech riders and what it means to advance a show and why the production manager you love is the one who's already thought of the thing you haven't thought of yet. We're going to talk about the business of all of this — day rates, how to quote a job, what it means to build a reputation in an industry where your reputation travels faster than you do, usually in a group text.

We're going to talk about Hollywood versus festivals versus regional theater versus the circus, because I have worked all of those and they are the same job in the way that a salmon and a goldfish are the same animal: technically true, deeply misleading. We're going to talk about clown. Yes, clown. It's more relevant than you think, and I will absolutely make you understand why before this blog is done.

Some of this will be instructional. Some of it will be a rant. Some of it will be both, which is really the most honest way I know how to teach anything. If you've ever stood in the wings of something and thought *I have no idea how any of this got here* — this is for you. If you're the one who made it get there — also for you. I see you. You deserve a sandwich and a nap.

Welcome to The Grunt. Try not to break anything.

— Dots

*Dottie M. Soldati (they/them) is a performer, rigger, fabricator, and production worker with 20 years of experience across festivals, film, television, theater, and circus. They operate under Soldati.Rocks LLC out of a converted Chevy Express van, currently parked wherever the next gig is.*