Stage deck

A stage deck is one panel of a demountable stage: a rigid frame with a plywood top, carrying removable legs at the corners. The standard module in United States event work is four feet by eight, with half and quarter sizes, triangles and curved units to close out odd shapes.

Height is a property of the legs, not the deck, which is why a stage can be any height within reason rather than a short list of options. Changing a stage from sixteen inches to thirty-two is a leg change, and it is worth asking for early because it changes the stairs, the ramp and the sightlines with it.

Load is the number to get right, and three different figures get confused. The building code treats stages and platforms as a hundred and twenty-five pounds per square foot of live load. Rental decks are commonly published at a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds per square foot. And none of those are what matters if the load is a concentrated one — a grand piano, a forklift-placed scenic piece, a drum riser with a motor over it — where the question is what a single leg carries, not what a square foot does.

The deck that is usually under-specified is the one nobody is standing on: the platform carrying a video wall or a line array, where the weight is static, heavy and in one place.

Staging and rigging — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Riser A small raised platform for a specific thing — a drum kit, a camera, a choir, a panel — and almost always the piece that gets left off the drawing.
• 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.
• Guardrail The barrier along an open edge — required by code above thirty inches, built at forty-two inches high, and carrying an exception for performance areas that is routinely misread as a blanket one.