Rope Tricks

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 14, 2007

Keeli Cambourne

After a variety of jobs in the film industry, Keyna Imray retrained as a rigger and joined the circus, writes Keeli Cambourne.

Keyna Imray has never taken the traditional route. After working in a northern NSW timber mill in her early 20s, she decided to take up a TAFE offer at 27 to become a carpenter - completing a pre-apprenticeship course and securing a job in the film industry building sets.

A workplace injury years later meant Imray had to down tools. She retrained as a computer drafter for films, working on such projects as The Matrix Reloaded and The Chronicles of Narnia.

But Imray wanted something more. Three years ago, at 47, she went back to TAFE to get her rigger's ticket, where she was one of only two women in a class full of blokes wanting to work in high-rise construction.

Imray wanted to use her rigger's ticket to fly high in a completely different field - as a rigger for the aerial and acrobatic group Circus Monoxide.

"After you get your ticket you have to get some work experience before you're legal, and I knew I wanted to do that in the circus industry," Imray says.

"There's lots of rigging work within the entertainment industry. Basically riggers are responsible for anything that is off the ground ... I love ropes and always have done."

Imray was a founding member of Circus WOW - a women-only circus in Wollongong - where she used her rigging experience with the knots and ropes for the trapeze.

"Circus WOW shared a performance space with Circus Monoxide and that's how I ended up working for them," she says.

As well as helping to set up the tents and other rigging for the circus, Imray is now one of its main attractions, using her rigging knowledge in a unique performance with aerial artist Violet Morrison. The act, called Decompression, won first place in the Unhinged Short Play Festival in Wollongong in 2005.

"It works on a system of counterweights and balances," Imray says. "Doing the counterweight component in a show can sometimes become part of it. I am close to the audience, I'm not lit, but I am seen.

"Other types of rigging are usually very much in the background in this type of work, so it is nice to be able to show people just what we do."

Imray's part in the act is not only as a counterweight to Morrison's acrobatics - if she puts a foot wrong, moves too quickly or is the least bit unfocused, Morrison's safety is put in jeopardy.

"It is a big responsibility and sometimes it is scary with that particular piece because Violet works over a bathtub and I have to make sure she doesn't fall on to it," she says.

"I've got to be totally focused while it's happening. You learn to just block out the noise and although I am aware of things, I don't actually hear anything and just work off Violet's cues."

Imray's work with Circus Monoxide brought her to the attention of Sydney theatre act Legs on the Wall, with whom she has toured.

In October, she will hit the road again for a Circus Monoxide tour through regional NSW.

"Rigging work has let me travel a lot," she says. "Depending on who I am working with, I can be in Perth one day and Melbourne the next."

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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