[SML] Portable audience seating

[Dale Farmer]

   Get with your local rental shops, probably the same company that does 
the tents and staging.   Also get in touch with your local fire 
inspector to see what they are going to require.   I've done this exact 
situation for outdoor music festivals.   Seats are going to be a major 
user of manpower to setup and tear down.    Rentacenter had about 80,000 
chairs available around 2000 for the dedication of the WW2 memorial in 
Washington DC, I have no idea what it cost to rent all of those, but we 
had a crew of around a hundred working for a week from a day labor 
company to set them up, not cheap to pay them either.

    The last couple of shows I did like this (pre covid)  the local fire 
inspector required the following.  we had around 500 seats inside the 
performance tent, and another 200 in an adjacent beer serving and 
drinking tent.  There was a fence around the beer zone, so he treated 
them as two different venues for seating capacity.   The more seats, the 
more requirements get triggered.   Things like aisle widths, fire 
escapes, emergency lighting, and the like.
    We only had available light plastic folding chairs from the local 
rental company.  They had clips that fastened them together into rows, 
but you had to fasten them on with a screwgun, and as it turned out, had 
a lot fewer of them available than we needed.
    Initially he wanted each row fastened into rows, with ground stakes 
at each end of each row and aircraft cable attaching the chairs to the 
stakes.  We pushed back on that, and eventually settled on threading a 
strong twine (electricians pulling twine) through the bottom of each row 
of chairs and tying the twine to giant nails driven into the ground at 
each end and every tenth chair.
   This was an annual festival run mostly on volunteer labor.  Setup of 
the chairs was done by a crew of inmates from the state prison labor 
program.  Which had a cost for the crew, mostly to pay the Correction 
officers, the inmates, and we provided a much better lunch than the 
baloney sandwiches the prison sent.

   Teardown we had the announcer at the stage at the end of the last set 
make their announcements while our ops crew went down the rows cutting 
the string holding each row together.  They then asked the audience 
members to pick up their chair, fold it up, and stack them outside the 
tent so we could strike the stage, sound and lighting with the floor 
clear.  The chair rental folks restacked the chairs onto pallets to load 
into their trucks the next day.

IF you have a need for more frequent setup and strike, then the labor 
costs of individual chairs will wreck your budget.

Dale

On 12/4/2024 9:53 AM, Joe via Stagecraft wrote:
> I am designing for a portable show, that will be done under large tents 
> on grass. We are planning for audiences up to 1,000. We don't want to 
> get into raked seating, since the audience will be wrapped around the 
> whole stage area, so the seating is not too many rows deep.
> 
> Are there any portable audience seating system that are designed for 
> quick set-up/tear-down? Perhaps with groups of seats ganged together? It 
> also must be suitable for use on grass.
> 
> -Joe
> 
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