THE PEOPLE BEHIND STAGELINE POPULARITY

The Breakaway Music Festival, boasting some of the biggest hip-hop and EDM names in the industry, has made a name for itself providing a stage to the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Wiz Khalifa. The stage in question is the SL320, and the team behind it is Technotrix, located in Chicago, Illinois.

In many ways, says Technotrix’s Andy Kuhlmann, the company decided to buy a SL320 for obvious reasons: weather protection. In previous years, Breakaway has had stops in Columbus, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Nashville Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina. The festival’s 2020 season has tentatively booked dates running from late August to early November, and including new locales of Washington, DC and San Diego, CA. While that’s an exciting range for a producer to service, it also means preparing to deploy the stage and run the show in the South, the Midwest, and now Southern California. With that comes weather uncertainty, and Technotrix was getting tired of having to work around rain delays. They were ready to invest in an upgraded stage, and the SL320 caught their eye.

« The 320 was a better product—and it has a lot more weather protection, » Kuhlmann says. « We needed to have a better service offering. »

At the same time, he says, Breakaway likes to put up plenty of lights and scaffolding for video walls.

« Most of our uses are for outdoor concerts, » Kuhlmann explains. « We do a lot of accessorizing with [the 320]—building wings or scaffolding structures to support lights and video walls to give you that better, larger first impression for attendees coming to your music site. »

The idea to invest in a Stageline unit wasn’t abstract. Rather, Kuhlmann credits an encounter with Stageline mobile staging technician Jonathan Pel