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Seriously – it’s Floating!
Serious Stages designed and coordinated the construction and installation of a completely customised floating stage on the lake at Kenwood House, London, for the 2006 Summer Season of classical, jazz and pop concerts produced by the IMG Group.
This radical approach was adopted to help contain the environmental noise spillage, by completely isolating the stage so it had no contact with the ground.
The stage, measuring 18 metes wide at the front, 12 at the back by 12 metres wide, featuring 10 metres of headroom, weighed approximately 70 tonnes and was floated on 27 4.8m long x 2.4m wide pontoons, each a metre deep. The pontoons were commissioned by Serious and made by Steeldeck.
The lake sits at the base of surrounding natural amphitheatre-like terrain, and the stage shape was developed to offer the tunnel like effects of shrinking perspective to the audience sitting on the hill opposite, drawing them into the action with its wide fronted aperture diminishing at the rear.
A two metre high scaffolding deck was built on top of the pontoons, and the four arches making up the stage superstructure – all slightly different sizes – were craned onto that. The arches were fabricated in steel because they had to support the weight of full plyboard cladding throughout the structure – another element of the noise reduction strategy. Once this stage was fully erected, it was skinned both inside and out using the standard Serious black and silver covering – for further acoustic absorption as well as aesthetics.
Serious supplied two specially adapted versions of their Lunar PA towers which bolted onto either side of the stage offering an impressive 17 metres in height, supporting the Funktion One Resolution 5 sound system supplied by R G Jones.
The overall balance of the structure once floating was spot-on, ensuring that no additional ballasts were needed.
Serious’s team was led by Gavin Harper, working with a seven-person crew for the initial part of the get-in. It took a week to install the pontoons in the lake, and the crew was boosted to 10 for the final two days of the built period, which included filling the whole stage with scaff to access the roof and complete the sheeting process.
They also installed their new ultra safe vertical bar handrail system around the complete structure – complete with vertical bars to reduce potential fall-throughs.
At one stage there had been some concerns about the possible impact the floating stage might have on the environment and local wildlife, but it turned out to be the opposite in reality! Once the pontoons were rigged and the stage and towers were in place, one moorhen lost no time in nesting and laying eggs beneath one of the speaker towers – all of which hatched and were mobile in time for the season to kick off.
12th September 2006
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