The extensive amount of work that is required to send a person soaring across a theater stage into a graceful glide is nothing short of incredible. Many people sit in the audience and gaze admiringly at the soaring star without having the slightest idea about how much work it took to send that one person into flight.

On the other hand, Tracy Nunnally, technical director for the NIU School of Theatre and Dance is very much aware of the amount of work required. He and Delbert Hall, a professor at East Tennessee State University and the owner of the flying effects company, Hall Associates, started the Flying Effects Workshop. NIU will host the fourth Flying Effects Workshop Sept. 5 through 8. This year’s workshop will be held at NIU’s O’Connell Theatre, located inside the Stevens Building.

“The Flying Effects Workshop is three to four days of instruction, with exercises in stage production and movies and [the participants in the workshop] get to increase their skills and maybe learn a new skill,” Nunnally said.

Since flying is such a new area of technology for theater, there hasn’t been a lot of time dedicated to starting a workshop, until 1995 in Northwestern Canada, when Nunnally began teaching the art. Its second workshop was held in 1998 in Radford, Va. The last workshop was held at Northwestern University in Evanston, Il. in 2001, and also was the most popular. Its popularity for that year may have been due to the fact that it was held in the Midwest and was an almost “happy-medium” for all participants.

“It is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how to fly people,” said Bill Auld, a graduate student in Theater Arts-Design & Technology. “There is nowhere else you can go to get such a body of knowledge on this subject.”

If skills are what participants are looking to learn or just to perfect, they will have their choice of topics. They include: the physics of rigging; mechanical advantage and straight-lift systems; motorized and simple pendulum systems; harnesses and blocks; and choreography.

“The physics of getting them [the flyee] up there is one thing, but making it look good is a whole different thing, and learning these skills and how to incorporate them is what this workshop is all about,” Nunnally said.