What we learned from our first festival mainstage

Taking eight robots to a 15,000-person outdoor festival taught us more about fleet choreography in four days than a year of studio rehearsal. Three things, in the order we learned them.

The first was scale perception. Moves that read clearly in a 300-person venue disappear at distance. We had to increase gesture amplitude by roughly 40% and slow the tempo by 15 BPM before the formations started reading from the back of the field. What feels large in a studio is invisible in a field.

The second was wind. Outdoor shows introduce a physical variable we'd never had to account for. At sustained wind above 25km/h, our lighter units develop a small resonant oscillation in certain static holds. We now build wind-counter poses into outdoor choreography — subtle weight shifts that break the resonance without reading as a mistake to the audience.

The third was crowd noise and timing. We rehearse to a click track. The audience doesn't. We learned to build longer holds than we think we need, so the crowd has time to react before we move on. A beat that feels empty in rehearsal becomes the space where the audience lives.

The show landed. Eight robots, 18 minutes of choreography, no mechanical failures. The headline act started 20 minutes late and nobody on the crew thought twice — we'd built the hold protocols in rehearsal. That felt like the real win.