Masking

Masking is the soft goods hung to conceal everything the audience is not meant to see: the wings, the loudspeakers, the lighting positions, the cable, the cases and the people waiting to go on. Vertical panels at the sides are legs; the horizontal panel across the top is a border or teaser.

It works by sightline rather than by coverage. A leg only masks from the seats whose view it intercepts, which is why masking that looks complete from the centre of the room fails for the far side seats first. Checking a stage from the extreme left and right front seats is how a crew discovers the audience can see into the wings, and it is a five-minute check that is routinely skipped.

Borders do the same job overhead. Without one, the front rows look up into the rig and see truss, cable and the back of every fixture.

Masking has a cost in stage width and in light. Every leg occupies space a performer could have used, and every border intercepts light from fixtures hung behind it — a border hung too low will cut the top off a projection beam or shadow the back of the stage, and finding that after focus means moving it.

On a ballroom stage with no architecture, the masking is the architecture, and it is the single cheapest thing that makes a stage look built rather than assembled.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Proscenium The frame a stage is viewed through — a wall with an opening in it, which decides what the audience can see and gives everything else somewhere to hide.
• Soft goods The collective name for every piece of fabric in a production — drapes, legs, borders, skirts, cycs and backdrops — and a category that lives or dies on its paperwork.
• Backdrop The surface behind the stage — fabric, printed, hard scenic or an LED wall — and the decision that sets what the lighting and the cameras can do.