Most school halls and dance studios were not built with lighting in mind. There's a bit of house light, maybe a couple of tired floods on a bar, and a show to get on. Hire lighting fills that gap. This category covers the fixtures that do the real work on a small stage: profiles for sharp, controllable beams, moving washes for colour and movement, and battens for even bands of light across a cyclorama or a dance floor. Prices are per day. Take the kit to run yourselves, or add a technician who will rig, focus and operate it on the day.
Three fixture types cover most small-scale work.
A profile gives you a hard-edged beam you can aim at one thing. The Selecon PLPROFILE1 zooms between 18 and 34 degrees, carries four shutter blades for trimming light off a wall or a set edge, and takes a gobo in its accessory slot. Reach for a profile when something needs lighting specifically: a soloist, a doorway, front light that must stay off the cyclorama.
Washes do the opposite. They throw soft, wide colour with no defined edge. The Equinox Fusion 260ZR MKII and Fusion 300FXP are moving washes, so they pan, tilt and zoom as well: a lot of looks from few units, which is why they suit dance shows where the picture changes every number.
Battens are linear. The LEDJ Pixel Storm 12 Quad Batten MKII and Chauvet COLORband PiX-M sit on the deck or fly on a bar and give an even band of colour — up a cyc, along the front of a stage, behind a dance line. Chauvet's tilts on a motor, so it can face the audience for one number and the cloth for the next.
Lighting a hall that has no rig
The commonest mistake in a school hall is rigging the pretty stuff first. Colour on the back wall photographs well. It does nothing for the grandparents in row eight who cannot see a face.
Front light comes first. Two or three profiles on stands each side of the hall, angled in at roughly 45 degrees across and 45 degrees down, will light faces properly and throw shadows downwards rather than sideways. Everything after that is decoration on a picture that already works.
With no lighting bar you are working from stands. Wind-up stands get fixtures high enough to be useful; short tripods put light straight into performers' eyes. Throw distance matters as much as height. The same profile covers roughly twice the width from twelve metres as it does from six, so a long hall needs fewer units for the same stage, provided there is somewhere at the back to put them.
DMX without the jargon
DMX is the control signal, and simpler than it looks. One cable leaves the desk into the first fixture, out again into the next, and on down the line: a daisy chain, not a star. Each fixture is given a start address and reads a block of channels from there.
That block's size depends on the mode you select. The Pixel Storm 12 Quad Batten runs as one colour across the whole bar in a short mode, or with every LED addressable in a long one. Choose the smallest mode that does what the show needs; a universe holds 512 channels and pixel modes eat them quickly.
Terminate the last fixture with a 120 ohm terminator. Use proper DMX cable rather than mic cable — the impedance is wrong and the flicker it causes is miserable to trace on a show day.
How many fixtures, and what about power
A workable starting point for a hall show is four to six profiles for front light, two or four battens for colour behind, and a pair of moving washes if the looks need to change. Drama with a fixed set wants more profiles. Fifteen dance numbers want moving heads and battens, because you get variety without refocusing between pieces.
Power is rarely the obstacle it once was. The PLPROFILE1 draws around 150 watts where the tungsten profile it replaces drew 500, and it dims internally, so there is no dimmer rack to hire. Moving washes are the hungriest items here, at up to roughly 300 watts each. Worth checking which sockets share a circuit — halls often run the whole room off one ring, and the kitchen urn is on it.
Desks, strobes and the finishing touches
Fixtures are half the job; the rest is control and effect. We hire lighting desks from the school-friendly Zero 88 FLX S24 up to the Orb for bigger plots, so the rig you take is one you can actually drive. Around the edges sit the pieces that finish a look: a strobe for lightning and chase moments, sunstrips for warm retro footlights, battery uplighters for walls and foyers with no cabling, and LED pars by the handful for general colour. If you are not sure where to start, tell us the venue and the show and we will draw up a rig that fits both.
Rates are per day and exclude VAT. Ask us about multi-day and show-week rates, delivery, and hiring with a technician.
Common questions
Yes. Everything in this category can be dry hired if you have someone confident to rig it, set DMX addresses and run the desk. If you haven't, adding a technician is usually the more straightforward option. Rigging and focusing from scratch takes longer than most people expect, and show day is not the moment to be learning fixture menus.
For anything with cues, yes — a desk and DMX cable to link the fixtures. The Equinox moving heads and the LED battens will also run standalone in sound-active or auto mode, which is fine for a disco and no use for a show. Tell us what you are lighting and we will match the control to it rather than sending something with more faders than you need.
Yes. Battens are designed to stand on the deck and light upwards; profiles and moving heads go on wind-up or T-bar stands. Two things to think about: the moving washes are heavier than they look, so the stand and its base need to be up to it, and stands in a hall have to sit somewhere the audience will not walk into them. Mention your venue when you enquire and we will tell you what fits.
No. These fixtures mix their own colour from RGB or RGBW LEDs, so there is nothing to cut, nothing to replace mid-run and no fading over a week of performances. The one thing colour mixing will not do is match a specific named gel exactly. If your designer has specified one, tell us and we will be honest about how close you will get.
