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.*