A History of Foy & 20th Century Stage Flying
In 1950, a young Englishman named Peter Foy sailed from London's West End to stage the flying for a Broadway production of Peter Pan, starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. Foy's services and the flying equipment were provided by Kirby's Flying Ballets, a British company hired by the show's producers after they discovered that virtually no theatrical flying had been performed in the United States for more than two decades.
Foy returned to fly Mary Martin's Peter Pan when the musical version premiered in 1954. For this show, he created a new system known as the Inter-Related Pendulum. Martin's soaring aerial choreography thrilled audiences and marked the beginning of a new era in stage flying, and Foy's subsequent technical innovations soon established Flying By Foy as the standard of the industry.
The Inter-Related Pendulum made spectacular highly controlled free flight possible. However it requires operators with a high degree of skill and a minimum of 40 feet of ceiling height in order to create a natural-looking, effective pendulum swing. Foy solved the problem of flying actors in low height situations with the invention of the Track On Track in 1958.
His determination to preserve the magic of theatrical flight by concealing its apparatus from the audience's view led to his introduction of the patented Track On Track system in 1962, which allows two operators to independently control lift and travel. Since that time, Foy has improved upon the basic concept of Track On Track, most notably with the patented Inter-Reacting Compensator system, developed for the touring productions of the Ice Capades.
Throughout his lifetime, Peter Foy has applied his mechanical ingenuity to the challenge of safely flying actors in a variety of different and often difficult physical circumstances. His creation of the Multi-Point Balance Harness for the 1965 movie Fantastic Voyage set a standard still used today for flying actors on film; he pioneered the use of self-contained truss systems for touring productions, and also introduced the first self-contained radio-controlled flying system at the Flower Expo in Osaka, Japan in 1990.
Over the past half-century, he has revolutionized methods and techniques used in stage flying that had remained virtually unchanged for 2,000 years. Perhaps this is one reason the Health and Safety Codes Commission of the United States Institute of Theatre Technology presented to Peter Foy the 1990 International Entertainment Safety Award for his singular, personal and creative contributions to safeguarding human life during a period of 50 years in the entertainment industry and elevating the task of flying people with rigging to an art form.
