14The stage itself

The short version: Big electronic dance music stages are steel structures from a handful of specialist builders, with scenery layered on top and the DJ booth as the visual center. They are built very wide, not deep, which means a lot of ballast and a lot of wind engineering. The 2011 Indiana State Fair collapse is the reference case for what happens when that engineering fails.

The builders

• Stageco was founded in Belgium in 1985, growing out of stage work for the Rock Werchter festival; it builds stages, ground support, delay towers and temporary structures for clients including the Rolling Stones, U2, AC/DC and Metallica³⁵².
• Mountain Productions, founded in 1979 in Pennsylvania, supplies staging, roof systems, mobile stages, truss, risers and delay towers, with offices in Europe as well as the US³⁵³.
• Star Events (UK) built the VerTech roof used at many UK festivals; as of 2011 its spans carried up to 7.5 metric tons each³⁵⁴. Its domain now redirects to a for-sale page, so its current status is unclear.

What an electronic dance music mainstage takes

TomorrowLand - A Look From The SkyPhoto hosted by Global Stomping - open the original

TomorrowLand 2014Photo hosted by StampMedia - open the original

The best numbers come from the builders and promoters themselves.

• EDC Las Vegas 2013, kineticFIELD - an owl with video-screen eyes whose wings closed around the DJ booth between sets: 480 feet wide, more than 335 tons of scaffolding and structure, about 1,968,000 pounds of ballast, more than 2,000 lighting fixtures and over 2 MW of power, in a festival with a reported $35 million production budget³⁵⁵.
• EDC Las Vegas 2014, "The Cathedral" - 120 meters (about 400 feet) wide and up to 30 meters tall, in black steel; seven containers from Belgium and 27 trailers from Colorado, a seven-day build worked overnight because the steel got too hot to touch in the daytime, and test-built in Belgium that March³⁵⁶.
• EDC Las Vegas 2017, kineticFIELD - a modular design with a 220-foot touring center section extended to about 440 feet in Las Vegas; about two weeks to build with 50 supervisors, up to 100 local stagehands a day, 40 structure trucks, four 70-ton cranes and 125 boom lifts¹.
• Tomorrowland 2025, the emergency rebuild - after the mainstage fire, a replacement 70 meters wide and 8 meters high with about 700 LED cabinets went up in somewhere between one and two days, using parts of Metallica's touring rig airlifted from Austria^99357358. The build time depends on who is counting: under 24 hours, 36 hours, or under 48^99357358.

The Tomorrowland rebuild, in our reading, shows how much of a mainstage is bespoke scenery. Touring LED and ground support could stand in for it overnight, at about half the width and a fraction of the height.

Things that move

Moving scenery and lights run on entertainment automation: variable-speed chain hoists, load cells and control consoles such as TAIT's Kinesys family³⁵⁹, or large cable-winch rigs like KINETIC lights, whose installations include ABBA Voyage and Hakkasan Las Vegas³⁶⁰.

When the structure fails

On 13 August 2011, a gust of about 59 mph hit the stage roof at the Indiana State Fair before a Sugarland concert. Seven people died³⁶¹. The engineering review found "inadequate capacity of the lateral load resisting system": the roof was required to withstand 68 mph, its concrete-barrier ballast could resist only about 25 to 43 mph, and the guy lines and connections were too weak; there had been no engineering review of the rig as built, and no clear protocol for delaying a show³⁶¹. Its long tail runs through the rest of this guide: the Event Safety Alliance formed in response to it, and still runs panels on the collapse³⁶²³⁶³.

What we could not source: specific DJ booth and riser design numbers - heights, isolation from bass vibration, deck stability - or scrims and projection surfaces. They are listed under open questions at the end.

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