Since December 2002 Spitalfields Festival has been ?On the Move?, writes Charlotte Ray. From its origins as a single-venue music festival based in the baroque masterpiece of Christ Church, Spitalfields in London E1, it has spread its wings across a much wider local area. In June 2004, 50 events will take place in 16 venues over 18 days.
Our regular freelance front of house manager, Silvana Caradoc-Evans and the 50-plus cohort of dedicated volunteer stewards now welcome a much wider range of audiences to relatively unfamiliar venues: sacred, secular, theatrical, outdoor and community centres. Invariably they are not standard concert venues, and we have to create a safe and comfortable environment with whatever resources are to hand. Despite the different size, atmosphere and facilities of various venues, the principles of operating in them remain the same: to be aware of risks, anticipate problems and provide a friendly and welcoming face to all-comers.
Of course, there are always some horrors with new venues ? the seating plans that suddenly don?t match the reality, nearby burglar alarms blasting into life mid-concert, lifts that don?t work, or local homeless sleepers who are understandably perturbed to find 400 people turning up on their usual doorstep. However, there are a few lessons we have learnt. We gather information assiduously from the different venues, making the many venue managers our allies. This always seems to take much longer than we think it will. We get staff involved early on by sending them on venue visits, charged with ferreting out information for themselves from various areas of a building. We then hold a full briefing for our stewards a month before the Festival at one of the venues, providing concert information, ticket-sales information, health and safety updates, and so on. Since they are concert-goers too, we also ask our stewards for their impressions of venues and how front of house operations can be improved upon.
For each venue, we communicate the following information to our stewards: how to find the venue, transport and parking, nearby catering facilities, who?s who at the venue, disabled access details, emergency exits, health and safety considerations, the quality of sightlines from various seating areas and potential bottlenecks in audience flow ? and then where everybody is likely to socialise at the end of the evening!
Charlotte Ray is Events Director of Spitalfields Festival. t: 020 7377 0287;
e: charlotte.ray@spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk;
w: http://www.spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk