Versace 2011
In October each year we run an event at the 6-star Palazzo Versace Hotel, on the Gold Coast. The event runs over four days, and consists of daytime “corporate” sessions and evening dinners, all of which take place in the main ballroom.
The day sessions are taken up with speaker presentations, using only the front half of the ballroom. This is set up “theatre-style” with the ballroom partitioned off by a removable wall, halfway back.
The evening sessions are banquet dinners, featuring entertainment from some of Australia’s finest artists. In previous years, we have hosted artists such as James Morrison, Marina Prior, Darryl Braithwaite, Glenn Shorrock, and this year it was Jon Stevens and AbbaLive (on different nights!)
The main challenge is the short changeover time between the day and evening sessions. As soon as the day session ends (around 1pm), the rear wall partitioning is removed, and we expand to occupy the entire ballroom. The stage depth is doubled (to accommodate the evening band), a dance floor added, and the room is set up with banquet tables. We also relocate the audio and lighting consoles to the rear of the ballroom.
Typically we only have a couple of hours to get this all finished, ready for band sound check. At the end of the night, the process is reversed – consoles are relocated back to the front half of the room, half of the stage is struck, the dance floor and banquet tables removed, and the back wall replaced and the chairs are reset, all ready for the next day.
The key to getting all this done is good planning, and careful setup during the initial bump-in.
We take into account the complete audio patch for all three nights, and ensure that our looms (including signal inputs, foldback, stage power etc) are clearly labelled and laid out at the various points beside and behind the stage during bump-in, so that as soon as the additional stage pieces are added each afternoon, it is a simple matter to roll out leads etc to where they are needed for each particular act.
Here, the digital audio console comes into its own – for each different evening act, we will have pre-programmed the entire patch on the console. We use ethernet-equipped consoles where possible, because this allows us to quickly move the console to the back of the ballroom simply by patching a couple of ethernet cables
This year, we “hid” all of our evening show lighting behind stage draping, which we removed during the afternoon changeover, to reveal the lighting rig for the evening’s entertainment. In this way, the lighting rig was permanently set for the whole 4 days, but hidden during the day so it wasn’t a distraction for the daytime audience.
Each year we learn new and better ways of running the event – next year will be the 5th anniversary and already we are looking forward to it!
