Where the house lights live.
Theatre technology is everything that turns a room into a venue: staging and rigging, production lighting, performance audio, communications, control and the machinery underneath it all. We plan theatres alongside architects, renew mixing fleets for the state's stages, and engineer the machinery - orchestra pit lifts, acoustic clouds, rotating reflectors - that lets one room be many rooms.
What venue and theatre technology covers
A theatre is a machine for putting an audience in front of a performance, and theatre technology is the part of that machine you can specify. Stage rigging, lighting bars, drapes and tracks. Production lighting and its control. Performance audio, from the console to the last loudspeaker. Talkback and show relay so the crew can work. Assistive listening so the whole audience receives it. Stage machinery - lifts, hoists, acoustic elements - where the room has to change between uses.
It overlaps with audiovisual systems but it is not the same discipline. A boardroom needs a reliable display and a clear microphone. A venue needs sightlines, rigging loads, show-night workflow and a room that can be reset by a volunteer before the next booking. That is why theatre consulting is its own discipline, with the audiovisual design inside it rather than the other way around.
For architects and planners
We plan from the first briefing, while the rooms are still lines on a drawing: geometry and sightlines, rigging and loading, acoustic strategy, technical positions, riser and rack space, and the services the venue will still need in ten years. Then we document it so a builder can price it and a subcontractor can build it.
For operating venues
Console fleets specified, supplied and trained - the Arts and Culture Trust engaged us across six venues from His Majesty's Theatre to the Goldfields Arts Centre, with technician training delivered metro and regional.
The stage engineering
Motorised orchestra pit and platform lifts, variable acoustic clouds, rotating side-wall reflectors - and when the right part doesn't exist, we design it ourselves and prove it in pre-commissioning before it ships.
Theatre consulting in Western Australia
A theatre is not an audiovisual project with a stage attached. Sightlines, rigging loads, stage machinery, variable acoustics, control positions and the way a crew actually moves on a show night are settled early or not at all. By the time an audiovisual package goes to tender, the architecture has already decided most of them. A theatre consultant exists to get those decisions made in the right order, while they are still free to change.
We held the consulting role on Perth Modern School Auditorium: 700 seats, rotatable side-wall acoustic reflectors, an acoustic cloud, an orchestra lift and a pit for thirty players, designed to Department of Finance and Department of Education guidelines alongside the architects. Bob Hawke College's performing arts spaces were planned with HASSELL. At Piara Waters Senior High School and Mater Dei College we consulted on the documentation and hold the delivery contract as well.
Not every venue should be structured the same way. Theatre consulting is a small and specialised profession, and on a landmark performing arts centre the right answer is sometimes an independent specialist consultancy leading the design with a local team delivering the integration. Most of those consultancies sit on the other side of the country. We are glad to be the team on the ground for them. And we will tell you at the first meeting which structure suits your project, including when the answer is not us in the consulting chair.
Selected work
Arts & Culture Trust
A state-wide renewal of mixing systems for WA's Arts and Culture Trust - DiGiCo, dLive and Yamaha fleets for six venues,…
Open the record →Perth Modern School Auditorium
A 700-seat auditorium designed with SITE Architecture to state guidelines - rotating acoustic reflectors, an orchestra l…
Open the record →Swan Park Theatre
Stage lighting, audio and audiovisual renewal for a 594-seat community theatre working since 1990 - rebuilt to be run by…
Open the record →More from the record
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/ where this work lives / Government & Infrastructure · Theatre & Education · Commercial & Hospitality · Recreation