Proscenium

A proscenium is the architectural frame around a stage opening, and by extension the arrangement where an audience sits on one side and looks through it. It is the standard shape of a theatre, and it is the shape most ballroom stages imitate with drape and scenic flats even when there is no architecture.

Its value to production is concealment. The frame establishes a line beyond which the audience cannot see, so loudspeakers, lighting, cable, crew, performers waiting to go on and the back of every scenic piece live outside it. On a built ballroom stage the same job is done by masking legs at the sides and a border across the top, and getting those right is what separates a stage that looks finished from one where the room can see the operators.

The limitation is the mirror image of the benefit. Everyone views from one direction, so the furthest seats are a long way back and the extreme side seats look across the opening rather than into it. Those side seats are where the masking fails first, and checking them is how a crew finds out that row one on the far left can see into the wings.

Where a room is wide and shallow, a proscenium arrangement wastes the width, and a thrust or a wider opening with no deep wings serves it better.

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

• Thrust stage A stage that extends into the audience with seating on three sides — intimate, and a complete rewrite of where lighting, loudspeakers and cameras can go.
• Sightlines What each seat can actually see — the thing that decides stage height, screen height and where a camera platform may stand, and the thing a flat floor ruins.
• Stage skirt The pleated fabric that closes the gap between the deck and the floor — the cheapest thing on the stage and the first thing a photograph notices.