Last August, Finnish rapper Cheek, performed two historical concerts in the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. Cheek became the first domestic act that would play for a full stadium in Finland, selling out the 40000 capacity venue twice.
The staging was also on a scale not seen before for a domestic artist, complete with massive light show and pyrotechnics. Thirty-seven lorry loads of equipment were brought in, some of it hired from the UK and other Nordic countries. Some 700 people worked at the stadium each evening.
United Audio Starlight AB was asked to supply the stage equipment for this unique performance. The amazing and unique stage was designed to create an impressive setting for the performances, including a 450m2 LED wall.
Starlight is a Swedish based, specialized Rental Company; one of their major strengths is a broad collection of stages and structures, including the massive Prolyte Space roof.
The stage for Cheek was based on a 60m. wide overhead construction, with a depth of 10m. based on the Space Roof elements.
The massive width and relatively small depth of the stage raised some brows in the initial design phase. For this reason, Starlight contacted Prolyte Group for the necessary engineering support.
With the expert knowledge of Ivo Mulder, product manager Roof Systems, all calculations were made, in order to fit the total equipment weight of 48,7 tonne of equipment in the roof structure.
Apart from this payload, the total construction, including ballast, had a weight of 190 ton. To create a safe and stable construction, an enormous amount of ballast was required, each of the 12 towers supporting the structure had a ballast weight of 10 ton, while extra ballast was added to the front and backside of the stage, totalling to nearly 50 ton.
As Ivo Mulder states: “The biggest challenge was the stability of the system; combining a very large wind surface with the relatively small depth of the stage design is not so easy. Although this was a though one, it’s always very satisfying to find a solution that does not affect the original design”.
Watch a bird's eye video here
