General session production: loose chairs or fixed seats

Inside a festival, a multi-day conference or a municipal programme, the general session takes whatever space the programme has left. That is usually an exhibit hall, a civic hall, an arena floor or a tent. All four arrive as a flat floor with nothing on it.

A flat floor has no seating plan until somebody draws one, and the drawing is a permit document. A theatre or an arena bowl arrives with its seats, its aisles and its exit capacity already approved, and the production works inside them.

Everything downstream follows from that. On a flat floor the producer sets the depth of the seating block, the depth sets the distance to the furthest seat, and that distance sizes the screen. In a fixed house those numbers are given, and the question becomes what the building lets you hang.

Florida enforces the Life Safety Code at events. Rule 69A-60.004 of the Florida Administrative Code adopts NFPA 101, the Life Safety Code, Florida 2021 Edition as part of the Florida Fire Prevention Code, and Rule 69A-60.003 adopts NFPA 1, the Fire Code, Florida 2021 Edition. Both took effect on 31 December 2023.

Osceola County Fire Rescue prints the seating figures an event producer meets. Aisles “shall not be less than 44 in. where serving an occupant load exceeding 50”, and not less than 36 in. at 50 or fewer.

Between the rows, the aisle accessway “shall have a clear width of not less than 12 inches”, increased “by 0.3 in. for every seat over a total of 14”, with no requirement to exceed 22 in. A row of 24 seats therefore wants about 15 inches of clear gap behind it, where a row of 12 wants the 12-inch minimum.

Three more limits draw the block. The maximum distance from a seat to an aisle is 36 ft. A dead-end aisle may run 20 ft. A row served by an aisle at both ends carries 100 seats at most.

Those figures settle the shape of the house before a single fixture is hung. They decide how wide the seating can run, how deep it can go, and where the cable crossings fall, because an aisle is also the only place a crossover can sit.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s plan submittal requirements for temporary indoor events say that “row type seating over 200 seats will require all chairs to be fastened together in groups of not less than three”, or else securely fastened to the floor.

A general session clears 200 seats routinely, so ganging is the normal case. It costs crew time at set and again at strike, and it ends the habit of pulling a row back a foot during rehearsal to find camera clearance. Once the rows are ganged and the plan is approved, the geometry holds.

The same sheet asks the floor plan to carry exit locations and capacity, booth locations and sizes, and “aisle locations and dimensions for the event/exhibit being held.” The drawing is what gets approved, so it has to describe the show that will actually be built.

The City of Naples Fire-Rescue Department reproduces Table 7.3.1.2 of NFPA 101 in its special event tent application guide. Concentrated use without fixed seating is 7 net square feet per person. Less concentrated use without fixed seating is 15 net. Bench-type seating counts one person per 18 linear inches. Fixed seating uses the number of fixed seats.

“Net” is doing real work in that table. It means the seating area itself, once the stage, the back of house and the circulation are taken out. A 20,000 square foot hall does not seat 2,857 people; the factor applies to what is left after the build takes its share of the floor.

The factor is also not the same figure in every jurisdiction the plan reaches. The City of Tampa’s major events permitting guide asks construction services for “occupant type and occupant load (based on 15 sq ft per person)” on the floor plan. Two Florida authorities, two numbers, one submission. Read the sheet the authority having jurisdiction publishes before a seat count goes into a proposal.

Seat count is where the screen size is decided. The count sets the depth of the block, the depth sets the distance to the furthest seat, and dividing that distance by eight gives the image height the back row needs. The arithmetic is the same on either floor; only on a flat one does the producer get to change the inputs.

A theatre, an arena bowl or a civic auditorium inside the same programme removes most of what is above. The seats are counted, the aisles are built, the exit capacity was approved when the building opened. None of the seating plan is the production’s to draw.

What arrives in its place is a set of fixed sightlines. The rake, the first row distance and the balcony front are all given, so stage height and screen position are solved against them rather than chosen. A screen that reads cleanly from row three can be cut in half by the balcony rail.

The other constraint is physical. Front of house has to sit somewhere, and in a seated house every position it takes is a seat nobody sits in. House rigging points and their published capacities then decide what can fly at all, and where.

A general session reveal often ends with something large on the deck. If that something has a fuel tank, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s indoor event requirements apply: “fuel tank openings shall be locked and sealed in an approved manner to prevent the escape of vapors.” The tank may hold no more than half its capacity, and no more than 10 gallons, whichever is less.

The battery goes the same way. “At least one battery cable shall be disconnected and taped with non-conductive tape.” A vehicle that has to move under its own power at the end of the session is cleared with the authority having jurisdiction well before the load-in.

The soft goods sit on the same sheet. Draperies, curtains, decorations and stage scenery each need a certificate of fire resistance or flame spread documentation at submittal. Legs, borders and a masked set wall all count.

When the programme has no building to spare, the plenary goes under canvas, and the tent is permitted on its own terms. Osceola County Fire Rescue requires a permit for tents 900 square feet and larger, a minimum 10 ft separation between stake lines, and “a minimum of 10 ft outside of the tent shall be cleared of any combustible or flammable materials.”

Access rules do the rest. Fire lanes run a 20-foot minimum width and must come within 150 feet of any tent, concession stand or booth, and a 3-foot clearance is kept around fire protection equipment.

Those distances decide where the tent stands, which decides which way the stage faces, which decides where the sun sits at four in the afternoon and where the generator and its cable run can go. The aisle figures above then apply inside the tent exactly as they do in a hall.