Outfitting a School Auditorium Stage
By: Ted Paget
Many schools operated by religious communities plan to offer programs and facilities that are comparable to privately and publicly funded secular schools and districts. The paradigm calls leaders to prepare for what these schools will look like in the future.
It is common for the church school campus to incorporate an auditorium that is intended to support the school’s performing arts and educational presentation requirements. Very often, the auditorium also hosts regular all-school chapel services.
When constructing a new auditorium or renovating an existing auditorium, it is critical to consider a number of technical factors. These include: exiting requirements, sightlines to the stage for the audience, acoustics for both natural and reinforced sound (including music and the spoken word), theatrical and architectural lighting and controls, theatrical sound, and communications systems.
Often given “short shrift” during the design of a school’s auditorium is a discussion of how the stage’s equipment (the lighting, sound, masking drapery, and scenery) will be set up and used during production, then stored or removed from the stage after the show. Consequently, the stage can be difficult to use at best or dangerous at worst.
How to Manage Stage Equipment
Technically, stage equipment can be moved sideways (on wagons, on tracks, or manually) if there is enough floor space on the working stage, as well as proper access to backstage support spaces. Alternatively, the equipment can move vertically using either manual counterweight rigging, which requires users to change metal weights in order to balance the loads on pipe battens or by using motorized rigging equipment.
During planning, ask the following program questions. The answers will help determine how users of the new or renovated stage will manage all the stage equipment.
1. Who will supervise the work?
Do you plan to hire a professional technician whose only job is to run the stage crew? That person must understand the complexities of changing and operating stage equipment, including the time required to set up, rehearse, operate, and remove production elements and the changes of weight that occur as the stage’s pipe battens are loaded and unloaded. If, however, your stage’s supervisory staff will either have limited skills or if they must deal with both facility management and technical functions, the church school should consider installing motorized stage rigging in order to reduce both the risks involved in re-balancing counterweight battens and the time required for changeovers.
2. Who will do the work?
Do you plan to train and develop a crew of students and/or volunteers who will have the skills to understand and implement quick stage equipment changeovers manually? Or, will your crews be made up as needed for each event without considering their technical capabilities and/or physical strength? If you cannot ensure that your crews will be knowledgeable in the skills required to re-balance counterweight rigging and/or have the physical requirements for those tasks, look at the motorized stage rigging option.
3. What teaching function(s) will we use this stage for?
If your intention is to teach students skills that they can use in other performance facilities (churches with highly technical worship requirements, technical theatre programs in post-secondary educational institutions, etc.), implementing motorized stage rigging is recommended. Frankly, the movement in both the performance-oriented church market and other venues in which young technicians will likely be employed is toward using motorized stage rigging instead of manual counterweight rigging.
4. How do we accommodate disabled technicians?
If the church school intends to offer as many opportunities as possible for disabled persons to participate in technical stage activities, motorizing the stage rigging allows disabled staff, students, and volunteers to attach and remove stage equipment, as well as to operate the rigging system during productions. This is not an option with manual counterweight rigging, which requires both physical strength and the ability to climb ladders or stairs to move and load weights.
Design the Stage to Support Motorized Rigging
During early design, before the auditorium’s consultants develop the structural framing for the stage, the school needs to decide whether it will incorporate traditional manual counterweight rigging or a modern motorized rigging system.
If the stage-house is structured for counterweight rigging, motorized rigging will not be affordable until at least the first major renovation.
Here are some factors the school should consider:
1. With counterweight rigging, to achieve full batten travel on the stage, the building either has to get taller or the stage must have an arbor pit. The designer must deal with the travel limitations associated with the arbor lengths and the way the cables and handlines have to resolve both at the bottom of arbor travel (floor tension blocks) and at the top of arbor travel (cables gathering to go over the headblocks).
By comparison, a dead-haul motorized hoist achieves full travel without adding to the height (or depth) of the building.
2. With counterweight rigging, the greatest loads are seen at the top of the building on one side (arbor side) of the stage.
The head-beams must support all the design loads: horizontal, vertical, and their resultant. The loading gallery needs to support 350-400 pounds per square foot (psf) vertically since the majority of the system’s counterweights could be piled on its floor. Any intermediate operating gallery must support 150-175 psf vertical since counterweights can be stored there, as well.
The weights and the forces imposed on the head beams require that footings get both deeper and bigger and columns get heavier. In order to take the asymmetrical loading, either the roof steel or the grid framing has to be increased to deal with the loading from the headbeams out to the loftblock beams or gridwells.
By comparison, a lightweight (40-50 psf) work platform can be used to service the hoists. In addition, when hoists are mounted on both sides of the stage (opposed), the asymmetrical loading conditions are significantly reduced.
3. Because technicians must carry counterweights up and down from the stage floor to the loading gallery, the stage has to include stairs/spiral stairs/ship’s ladders.
By comparison, as long as the only requirement for vertical access is to service the hoists, a simple ladder system is acceptable.
4. The issue of allowing for “impact load” due to “runaways” has always been critical to counterweight stage construction simply because if the load becomes significantly unbalanced, the arbor will gain speed on the heavier side and most rope locks are not designed to arrest the uncontrolled movement.
The worst case occurs when the load discontinuity is arbor heavy. The danger occurs because the arbor comes down quickly while the load ascends at the same rate until it hits the first structural interference and begins to break, often reversing the imbalance. To deal with this, the structural engineer has to design the stage-house so that it will not “fail” if the rigging equipment hits the building’s structure.
By comparison, while it is true that you can have a runaway with a hoist, any constantly applied secondary brake is intended to mitigate the condition well before the load falls out of control. In addition, variable speed drive hoists with controlled acceleration/deceleration tend to reduce even the normal shaking that occurs when a load stops suddenly.
When designing new or renovating auditorium stages, discussions on stage equipment management will promote maximum functionality from the project.
These conversations take into account the supervision of and actual use of stage equipment. Discover the educational expectations included in the stage’s technical teaching program. If the school chooses to install a motorized rigging system, it is important to design the stage to accommodate that technology.
Design your auditorium after you examine your options. Offer your students the value and advantage of a high-quality performance and presentation facility.
Ted Paget spent more than 30 years as a designer and specifier for all types of public assembly venues. He is the sales manager for Vortek, a division of Daktronics, which designs, manufactures, and markets rigging systems for theatrical, architectural, and arena applications, www.vortekrigging.com.
