Ell Circo D’ell Fuego wants to help build a safe circus community! We want to make sure that everyone who comes in to train with us can do so in a safe manner. And we want to give other players within the circus industry the opportunity to do the same. Therefore, we are developing a three-part training course on safety, in collaboration with Circuscentrum.
The training modules zoom in on technical, physical and psychosocial safety. We started in the summer of 2022 with a four-day rigging course at Circusplaneet in Ghent and in our own training hall at SPRK.
Rigging, c’est quoi?
Rigging is the practice of hanging different components together in a safe way. So that users and bystanders can work with or look at them safely. For this training, Joppe Wouters of Circus Marcel, the rigger of the Flemish circus sector, worked out a course. He tells us the following:
“It is not an easy task to work as a circus technician, as a rigger. Because a number of components are made because we need them. Trapezes, climbing poles, tightrope installations,…already exist. But all the possible rigging materials we use are not made for circus per se. That is why sometimes we need to do some research. And also some math. To make sure that, when you come across a component, from any sector, we are able be to do the calculations and prove that it meets the load we want to apply to it from a circus point of view. And that is not as easy as it seems.”
The next module to be organized is a course on First Aid for Circus Accidents.