AVAVRIG · applied rigging

Where this leads

This course sits between your licence tickets and the specialist end of the industry. Here’s the map.

What your tickets already cover

The licence theory — dogging, gear ID, knots, comms, heights, the WHS framework — lives in the CPCC rigging units (Basic → Intermediate → Advanced) plus your dogging unit. AVRIG deliberately doesn’t re-teach any of it. What the tickets don’t do is convert that knowledge to trusses, motors and arena points — that’s the gap these nine lessons fill.

How to run the course

One lesson a week with the warehouse exercise done with real gear beats binge-reading the lot. The games are calibration, not decoration: when the sling sim, the bridle builder and the grid loader stop surprising you, the instincts are in. Lessons 1–5 are the conversion core; 6–8 are the arena craft; 9 marks the edges of the map.

Benchmark yourself internationally

The ETCP Certified Rigger – Arena exam is the international yardstick — 150 questions, and the free candidate handbook + formula sheet (in Resources) are effectively its published syllabus. A web practice exam is ~USD $35 at goamp.com. If the maths lessons here land, the Formulas & Forces domain will feel like home turf.

Formal Australian progression

The specialist entertainment rigging skill sets — CUASS00064 (Arena) / CUASS00063 (Theatre) — are now delivered locally (Arts Centre Melbourne’s RTO ran the Arena pilot with Showtech at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, July 2024). That’s the recognised pathway from a construction ticket into certified entertainment rigging work.

The stop-sign lines from Lesson 8 never expire: 3+ motors on one truss · cantilevers · circles and arcs · deliberate height differences · anything that moves as part of the show · anything outdoors in the wind · anyone suspended. Past any of these, the next call is an engineer or a specialist contractor — that habit is the real graduation.