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Arena Seat the Edinburgh Fringe
Edinburgh Fringe is known for its off-the-wall performances in extraordinary and unusual venues, be they a broom cupboard or a marquee shaped like an upside-down-cow, complete with inflatable udders. But one event industry supplier, Arena Seating, staged a unique performance of its own at the Fringe to an audience of tens of thousands of bottoms.
The leading seating company has worked at the Fringe for over two decades and supplied 4,500 seats to over 24 venues this year. It was a tough and unusual challenge for Arena, given that the venues range from office spaces to third floor rooms in historic Georgian buildings. This year all the venues, which ranged in capacity from 30 to 800 seats, were supplied with the company’s “In Style” range of theatre-type seating, complete with carpeted aisles and upholstered seats.
In contrast to the more typical Arena build, which might involve the installation of a large grandstand beside a sports track, Edinburgh presented a host of fascinating logistical puzzles. “The Fringe was one of our most challenging jobs of the year,” said Bradley Merchant, the company’s account director for the event. “Our crew worked in the back streets of the historic city, squeezing lorries into the tightest corners and carrying equipment up several flights of stairs. At one venue we had to load in through an upper floor window. It was like installing an arena through a letterbox.”
Among the Edinburgh Fringe venues fitted out by Arena were the Freemason’s Hall, the Pleasance Theatre (six venues) and that notorious bovine marquee belonging to structure provider, Underbelly. The build for the event took 14 days, while the load out was done in an extraordinary three-and-a-half days.
The company’s health and safety culture was much in evidence at Edinburgh. “We often worked in old buildings with timber floors,” said Bradley. “We had to ensure that floors were strong enough to take the load and that all the installations conformed to evacuation times and local authority guidelines.”
Key to the success of the operation, he continued, was “knitting together all the needs of the little venues and working out a logistics plan to meet them as closely as possible.”
Over the years Arena’s mission to “create a permanent environment for a temporary occasion” has become something of an artform itself and it was nowhere more evident than at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
1st October 2007
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