The striking new dance theatre in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Sadler’s Wells East officially opened its doors earlier this year as part of the £1.1 billion East Bank development. Built for contemporary dance, the new 550-seat theatre is joined by six state-of-the-art studios and a welcoming public foyer designed for pop-up performances, community events and creative exchange.
Behind the scenes, LSI Projects delivered the full stage lighting, AV and networking systems designing, supplying, installing and commissioning a complex infrastructure that allows every space in the building to communicate seamlessly. Working closely with architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, theatre consultants Charcoalblue and construction manager Mace, the team balanced architectural intent with highly technical performance requirements from the earliest design stages.
A key priority was to create a system that felt unified; something that could scale easily from a solo rehearsal in the studios to a full-scale dance production in the main house. “We knew this was always meant to be a more intimate space than the main theatre on Rosebery Avenue,” explains Alex Wardle, Senior Consultant at Charcoalblue, who led the theatre consultancy for the project. “That meant rethinking how the lighting, audio and video networks interacted across the performance spaces. Everything ties back to a single central rack room, which gives the venue complete control and future flexibility. It’s a small building doing big things.”
The centralised system design meant that all technical signals (including show relay, paging, control data and Dante audio), are routed through a unified Q-SYS backbone, with hundreds of tie-lines distributing connectivity across the theatre, studios and foyer. LSI’s Liam Hawes and Ian Thomas led the technical delivery, coordinating closely with Charcoalblue to ensure that performance infrastructure and architectural design worked hand in hand. “We built the system around a philosophy of over-provision,” says Hawes. “In practice, that means more connection points, more flexibility, and fewer compromises. From day one, the goal was to create a network where everything could seamlessly talk to everything else. Whether it’s a touring company or a local community project, we wanted to be sure the building could handle it.
Forming the backbone of the lighting network, ETC Sensor dimming and Paradigm architectural control tie the whole system together. Both theatrical and house lighting run across hybrid DMX/data lines to ensure reliability and speed, while secondary control points give the team the flexibility to run shows or rehearsals from multiple positions. Patching options are available at every level, making it easy to reconfigure and keep the system moving as fast as the people using it. “We’ve designed plenty of venues, but the challenge here was scale,” adds Thomas. “There’s no substage and storage is tight, so everything had to be modelled and planned in detail.”
Requiring serious coordination between disciplines, the team landed on a series of smart architectural solutions that kept the building’s technical demands beautifully hidden. To achieve this, LSI and Charcoalblue used Revit and BIM from the earliest stages, ensuring technical services and architectural features could be developed together without clashes. That digital precision allowed both teams to plan every millimetre of space while maintaining the aesthetic vision. Acoustic slatted walls double as concealment for future rigging points, lighting positions are built seamlessly into the architecture, and cable management routes were planned to keep sightlines clean and the space visually open. “It’s the kind of project where every centimetre matters,” says Wardle. “You walk into the auditorium and it looks beautifully simple – but that simplicity hides an incredibly sophisticated backbone.”
At the heart of the control system, the Stage Manager’s Desk was custom-built in-house by LSI to bring communication, control and monitoring together in one ergonomic unit. Q-SYS processing is fully integrated within the desk, allowing paging and relay configurations to evolve as the venue’s needs change. The adjustable height control makes it comfortable for seated, standing or wheelchair users. “It’s not just a desk,” says Jamie McIntyre, Senior Theatre Consultant at Charcoalblue, who oversaw commissioning and testing. “It’s the control hub for the entire theatre. From there, you can talk to every part of the system – lighting, audio, video, stage management. It’s an elegant bit of engineering, but it’s also intuitive for the operators who’ll use it every day.”
To keep signal integrity rock solid, LSI built dual Dante networks running over Cisco switching, with redundant fibre routes linking the main rack room and satellite positions. Tie-lines for analogue audio, data, fibre and loudspeaker circuits add another layer of resilience, allowing the entire building to function as one coherent system. “There’s a lot of power under one roof,” McIntyre adds. “We wanted the infrastructure to be bulletproof but invisible – something that gives artists total confidence because they know it’s all just going to work.”
The attention to detail behind this project truly showed its worth during the opening performance. In Act 1, the audience sat in a traditional tiered seating arrangement; before Act 2, the seating was quickly retracted and guests were invited onto the stage to celebrate alongside the design and engineering teams – showcasing the venue’s flexibility. “That felt like a real moment that captured the building’s purpose,” adds McIntyre. “That connection between performance, people and place.”
Now home to the UK’s first hip hop theatre academy and the internationally acclaimed Breakin’ Convention festival, Sadler’s Wells East has already proven itself as one of London’s most adaptable performance spaces. “It’s been brilliant to see how quickly the theatre team have made the space their own,” adds McIntyre. “From our side, we’re proud that the technology supports that freedom; that it enables the art, rather than dictating it.”
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