Social Distancing Seating for next season?

I've been asked to look into how much trouble it will be for us, but haven't had the time to sit down and work it out. The hardest part, I think, will be handling rollover.

I was thinking of seating everybody normally this summer so we don't corrupt important seating data and then duplicating performances this fall, kill every other pair of seats, then invite subscribers by price zone to "reseat" themselves via TNEW. We may also give them the option to exchange their ticket for a "digital-ticket" then we send an email an hour before showtime. 

We still get the majority of our renewals through print, so I struggle to see us getting subscribers to reseat themselves that way. I love the concept though!

Not yet, but absolutely something we should be doing!  It's a reality that we might have to face, so thank you for posting!  This probably wouldn't have crossed my mind until it was too late.

Same here!I am going to build our season as normal (because we have to start somewhere) and then alter as needed. If we need to kill seats, my plan is just to black them out. Will definitely affect subscriptions. I also wonder if we will need to add more performances

Is this a realistic possibility?  I mean, has a health authority suggested that they might use it as a pandemic mitigation strategy?

Even if one did it, ignoring the amount of surface touching involved in getting to seats in the middle of a venue, doors, hand-rails and bathrooms, you'd have to account for distance not just along a row but in the rows in front and behind, and also measuring diagonally.

Yeah, I think we might have to contact the state and county authorities. Maybe we have to kill every other row too. At some point, I'm going to go measure seats.

Yeah, so I'm thinking that this obviously wouldn't work:

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But also this wouldn't work because of the diagonal distances:

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And even this might be an issue depending on seat size:

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Yeah, no way to know until I get in the hall and measure seats. BTW, LOVE this visual Gawain! :-) I mean the airlines are doing something like this with no middle seats etc. The other issue is the artist and the Orchestra. Jamming an orchestra into a pit sounds high risk. 

Good point.

This is something I've been trying to think about as well. I was thinking of something similar with blacking out seats. The only problem is what you do with an odd numbered family. You wouldn't be able to get the third seat because it would leave a single seat. And if you allowed single seats to be purchased, someone not with the family could purchase the seat, defeating the whole thing. My other thought was GA might be doable, but that could get messy too. Definitely going to have some things to think about going forward. 

My biggest concern with this really comes down to how to figure out how to do this retro-actively as we've already started selling subscriptions for next season (and continue to do so)...hopefully (crossing all my fingers) it won't come to this, but I can see it being a nightmare to figure out and notify patrons.

We've had the discussion but backed away from it because it is not even close to financially viable to run a show with such a reduced capacity.  

We have always used GA seating for the events we do at the MFA Boston - but since this may be a solution to continue social distancing as we move forward, we are beginning to look at how we can show that seats would be separated throughout the house.  This could mean having a visible seating map, and how best to show this to buyers - something new for us.  Also looking at how to handle the single-seat purchases, everyone going for the aisles, as well as protocols for how you seat guests to continue the separation factors.  How do you handle latecomers who are sitting in the middle of the row (we have continental seating in both our theater venues)?  Would it be better to have a plan that you seat by row as guests arrive, filling in from the front to the back - marking off seats that are off-limits? 

Also thinking about how we will need to do a sanitation sweep in between events - and just how do you effectively do this with a mostly cloth-covered seating model that allows for time to clean and let the space air out before using it again (we sometimes have 4 film screenings at the height of a festival, with usually a 30 minute turn-around between screenings - something which may not be possible in our revised futures. Having 2 spaces could allow us to be fairly flexible about the volume, but the spaces are not capacity compatible (one is a little more than half the size of the other - and once you take out the seats that would not be used, your allowed numbers go down even further). 

Any venues out there who do more film screenings than other types of events, and have been starting to think about what that may look like in the near future?

Thanks all, and hope everyone is staying safe and in good health.  

Anne

We are in the same boat as Kari Swenson, in that we have already passed our subscription renewal deadlines and have begun subscription seating in advance of our ticket packet mailing in June. So, we are currently trying to figure out if this needs to happen, when and how we communicate this and re-seat everyone that has already purchased tickets, and in the case of some of our classical series, is more than what our house could hold if we were to properly social distance.

I welcome any and all ideas from those who have already begun selling and seating for performances in the fall.