You can hang a lot of things on a batten.  You can hang masking curtains such as teasers, legs, and all stage blacks; you can hang any type of flat unit, any type of object, or even people.  Mostly the fly system is used for curtains and scenery and people are not always connected to a fly system.

  The first aspect to flying anything in and out is to prepare the batten you are going to use.  Mostly the batten will have stuff already on it and it will have to be removed so you can put your scenery on the batten.  To prepare the batten, in our theater, you need to start out with an empty batten.  First you need to fly the batten in to the stage.  Next you need a person on the loading level to take weights off to “empty batten weight” so when the scenery comes off the batten, the pipe stays in and doesn’t slip through the locking clamp, but isn’t hard to fly back out.  The length of your batten, the determination of single or double purchase, and the size of your stage from side wall to side wall changes the number of stage weights needed to balance an empty batten.  Our system runs on this principle.  Our single purchase batten needs to have at least 17 pigs on the weight arbor since it has electrical boxes on it.  You can use wafers of course if you don’t have enough pigs, but you will need two of them to make each pig weight.  If we had this as a batten without any electrical boxes on it, you would have 3 pigs and a wafer to balance this rope set in our theater.  Our double purchase rope sets are all empty battens so you need 7 pigs on the arbor to balance them out.  To check to make sure you are balanced out, unlock the rope set and keep your hands near the rope but without touching it.  If the batten stays in, pull the back rope to bring the batten up a little and let go of the rope.  If it stays at that level without falling, the batten is all prepped.  Bring it back to the floor and lock it back in place.  After the batten is empty and in weight you are ready to hang your scenery or curtains.

Updated 12/3/2001 by Brian Batiuk