The stage is usually the last thing anyone specifies and the first thing the room gets built around. By the time somebody raises it, the seating plan is drawn and the screen size is agreed. Then the awkward questions start. How high should it be. Can the chief executive actually get onto it. Will it come through the loading door.
Stage hire for corporate events is not really a shopping decision. The decks are the easy part. What takes thinking is how a stage sits in one particular room, in front of one particular audience, with people who have to walk onto it and off it while everyone watches.
Stage hire for corporate events starts with the room, not the stage
Most enquiries arrive as a size. Six metres by four, please. That is a fine place to start a conversation and a poor place to end one, because the same footprint behaves completely differently in a low-ceilinged hotel suite and in a hall with a proper get-in, the trade word for the period when equipment is brought in and built.
We would rather know what is happening on the deck first. A lectern and one presenter needs very little. A panel with chairs and a low table needs depth and a clear walk-on route, and a band needs room behind the performers for backline, meaning the amplifiers and drums. Specifying equipment before understanding what an event is for produces the wrong equipment. That is true of audio visual (AV) kit generally and especially true of staging, because the deck is the one thing you cannot quietly swap on the day.
How high the stage needs to be
Deck height changes more than any other single decision. Too low and the back of the room watches your speaker through the heads in front. Too high and the front row spends the day looking up, while the walk-on turns into a climb.
The ceiling caps it. Every centimetre the deck gains, the air above it loses, and that air is where the lighting truss and the top of the screen live. In a low-ceilinged venue you are usually choosing between a taller stage and a taller screen.
You are also not choosing from a continuous scale. Modular staging is built from standard decks, commonly two metres by one metre, sitting on legs that come in fixed heights. The useful question is which of the available heights suits the room.
Sightlines are decided by the back row
Sightlines are the lines of sight from each seat to the stage. On a flat floor every seated person’s eyes sit at roughly the same height, so each row loses the bottom of the picture to the row in front. That is why the lower part of a screen on a flat floor is largely wasted, which we covered in our guide to LED screen hire for conferences, where LED stands for light emitting diode.
There are two ways out. Raise the stage, or raise the content on the screen. Both run into the ceiling, which is why height and screen size get decided together.
Width gets forgotten. In a wide seating block, people on the far edges see the stage at a sharp angle, and anything set flat against its back wall vanishes for them. We check the view from the worst seat in the room, because the middle always looks fine.
Getting people on and off the stage
Steps are the default and usually the afterthought. Where they sit and whether they are lit decides whether a nervous speaker arrives at the lectern looking composed. An unlit step edge in a darkened room is a hazard rather than a detail, and handrails are worth asking about instead of assuming.
Then there is the question almost nobody puts in a brief. If a speaker or an award winner uses a wheelchair, how do they get on? A ramp needs a run in proportion to the height it climbs, so a taller deck needs a longer ramp, and that length comes out of your seating plan. Deck height and access have to be settled in the same conversation.
Awards nights deserve their own thought. Winners come up out of a dark audience, sometimes at speed and sometimes after a long dinner, so the route from a table to the deck is part of the design of the night. It is one of the first things we look at on an awards ceremony.
Will it actually fit through the door
Staging is the heaviest and bulkiest thing that will enter your venue. The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance on venue and site design asks organisers to consider safe access for vehicles and pedestrians around a site, restricted height access for vehicles and lifting operations, and whether the ground can withstand the load put on it. That reads like outdoor site planning. It applies just as neatly to a hotel basement.
In practice we want the loading door dimensions, the size and weight limit of the goods lift, and whether the route involves turns or stairs. A lift that takes a handful of decks at a time turns a short build into a long afternoon, and it stretches the de-rig, the taking-down and loading-out at the end. Polished and timber floors need the route protected before anything rolls across it.
None of it is glamorous, and it is most of what separates a calm build from a frantic one. One of our published testimonials, from Monique Iball on an annual conference and awards ceremony, singles out a fast and efficient setup and a polite crew. That is what a planned get-in looks like from the client’s side of the room.
A stage is a temporary structure, and somebody owns it
This is the part the equipment listings leave out. A stage is a temporary demountable structure. The Institution of Structural Engineers is explicit that the category includes stages, that the client is the duty holder, and that the client should obtain written evidence that competent people are employed to design, erect, inspect and dismantle it, having first given the designer a written technical specification of requirements.
The Health and Safety Executive puts it in similar terms. Its guidance on roles at events states that the organiser has prime responsibility for the health and safety of workers, the audience and contractors, and that a contractor should be able to show evidence of a trained workforce and the competence of key staff.
So the duty sits with you, and the way to discharge it is to ask for the paperwork and read it. What the decks are specified to carry, as a load per square metre, matters if a vehicle or a heavy set piece is going on top. Who inspected the build, and what is rigged above the deck. A supplier who takes a day to produce any of that has told you something useful.
What to put in the brief
Send us these and we can specify a stage properly on the first pass:
- Room dimensions and ceiling height, including anything already hanging from the ceiling.
- The seating layout and audience number, and whether the floor is flat or raked.
- Everything going on the deck, including screens, lecterns, furniture and backline.
- Who has to get onto the stage, and whether steps work for all of them.
- The loading route, the lift dimensions and the access times.
- Your get-in and de-rig windows, and anything happening in the room either side of yours.
One more thing. Splitting staging, lighting and AV across separate suppliers moves the coordination risk onto you, and the stage is where it shows up first, because everything else lands on top of it. We supply audio, video, lighting, rigging, staging, outdoor stage and LED video wall from one source and deliver nationwide from our Manchester base, so one team owns the whole picture.
Talk to us about your stage
A room, a date and a rough idea of what happens on the deck is enough to start. Send the details through our contact page or email hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk, and we will tell you what works in that space and what does not. Our conference production pages cover what surrounds a stage, and our guide to dry hire against full production covers how much of the build you want to own.
