Limited Space, Limitless Creativity

Set-pieces are getting bigger, decorations are getting heavier, shows are getting increasingly complex and expectations of audiences and artistic directors rise year after year. Yet, there is one quality of great theatre that is often overlooked: efficiency.

But what role exactly does stage machinery play when it comes to efficient stage operations? We spoke with our very own Peter Neuwald in Denmark to find out.

No such thing as an inefficient theatre

Imagine a famed artistic director with a vision of a monumental Turandot-Set. Imagine she and her set designer come up with these huge set-pieces, several flats, wonderful backdrops, set dressings and a number of scene transformations.

Let’s say your stage is large enough and your stage machinery powerful enough to handle this play. But then your residential director also has ideas for his production of Aida, while a touring company wants to put the entire Ring Cycle from Wagner on stage and the youth outreach program insists on putting on a ballet version of Blade Runner 2049.

Your CEO is thrilled because she knows: these productions will sell out the house for months.

But your technical director is left with an impossible task: Set up, coordinate, program, rehearse and perform 4 highly complicated productions with three different shows on stage each single day.

Your stage is big enough for one of these productions, but it cannot sustain all 4 at the same time.

That’s the moment, efficiency, and careful stage design makes all the difference.

Maximising the Space for Creativity on Stage

The biggest challenge for any repertory theatre is space. You need space for :

• (temporary) storage of sets

• fabrication of decorations

• Get-in, assembly, and rigging

• strike and setup

• manoeuvring during technical turnovers

It’s not just that more space means bigger decorations.

It also means you can leave set-pieces assembled as much as possible and don’t need to  break down and re-assemble decorations between performances, saving you countless hours (and nerves).

But not every theatre has the luxury of the Copenhagen Opera House with side and backstages 6x the size of the main stage. Especially in listed theatres, every inch of space counts

That’s why a well-designed stage maximises the available room by minimising the space for machinery and optimising the layout of the machine rooms.

Custom Stage Machinery = More Space

If you’ve ever visited Waagner-Biro stages, you’ll have noticed that no machine room and no winch looks the same. That’s because our engineers carefully design every machine to the precise needs of the client and their available space.

Most suppliers only select the best-matching machine from their catalogue. But that means, their machines are almost always oversized: cable reels too large, motor and driver too powerful.

Custom designing every stage allows us to use machines that are exactly as powerful and large as needed, to give you that extra inch of space. It also allows us to use vertical or horizontal designs together with a smart cable routing to minimise the height of the fly loft or the depth needed for the lower stage machinery.

This saves costs and gives you more space to hang and store decorations.

The Right Mix of Machinery

It also means we can mix different types of stage lifts as needed: cable lifts for load-capacity, speed and quiet, and Spiralifts or Linklifts for small footprint and non-scenic movement, while making sure machine rooms are clean and every piece of equipment easily serviceable. Because the last thing you want is not being able to fix a winch before a show, because you can't reach it.

Knowing how a stage is actually used helps us find all the little (and sometimes big) ways to help you maximise the efficiency of your stage operation.

Efficient Stage Operation Needs Flexibility

Unlike a show theatre, where one single show is performed for years, any repertory theatre needs a lot of flexibility to use and program its machinery. If you put on new productions every few months, operators need to be able to easily setup new sets with ad-hoc movements, but also automate cues for technical turnovers (and scenic movement).

Most control systems are optimised for either ad-hoc rigging, or automation – very few systems include both modes, and none is as user-friendly and easy to learn as our CAT v5 control system. And the easier a system is to use, the faster your setup will be.

No creativity without efficiency

In the end, performative and narrative art has always been economical. The question of artists has never been „how might we create an impact?“ but „how will we create the biggest impact we possibly can?“

And as every professional artist knows, you need efficient tools to practice art and wow audiences.

These are the tools we work so hard to create and optimise. So you can focus on putting on your best show yet.

The Stage Is Yours

What are you going to do with it?

Waagner-Biro Stage Systems is the leading supplier of stage machinery and stage control globally. We’ve built many of the world’s most iconic theatres, operas, concert halls, and multipurpose venues.

Put your creativity to the max and talk to us about your ideas at office@waagner-biro-stage.com