Most couples walk into a wedding venue and see the wedding. I see a behavioural system. That sounds rather grand for someone who's essentially looking for somewhere to put a pair of speakers, but after enough weddings you start noticing that rooms quietly tell people what to do. They tell them where to gather, where to sit, where to drink, where to dance and, sometimes, where to disappear for two hours. So when I first walk into a venue, I'm not just thinking about where the DJ setup goes. I'm looking at how big the room is, how bright it is, what the walls are made of, where the bar is and whether the dancefloor feels like somewhere people will naturally drift towards or somewhere they'll feel slightly exposed standing on their own.
Size is usually the first clue. Huge rooms can be spectacular, but they're surprisingly difficult to make feel full. You can have fifty people dancing and still have what feels like several acres of apparently unused wedding venue surrounding them. Smaller rooms often create energy much more easily simply because everybody is closer together. Then there are the walls. Bare stone can look fantastic under the right lighting. White walls give you lots to work with. Dark walls absorb light but can create a brilliant atmosphere for dancing because people feel less visible. Fabric is rarely exciting to look at but can be wonderful acoustically. Almost everything in a venue is a trade-off, which is why “beautiful room” and “great room for a party” aren't always exactly the same thing.
Light changes behaviour more than people realise too. A room with huge windows might look magnificent at four in the afternoon, but in June it can still feel like broad daylight when you're trying to get a party going several hours later. Darkness helps. The outside world disappears a little, the room becomes more intimate and people generally become less self-conscious. The same applies to furniture. I've had surprisingly determined conversations with venues about removing more tables after dinner because rows of chairs around a dancefloor don't just provide seating; they create an audience. Give people somewhere to sit and, rather inconveniently, some of them will sit. Give them open space and a dancefloor that feels connected to the room and they become much more likely to wander onto it without feeling that they're performing for everybody else.
And then there's the bar, which has ruined more otherwise excellent room layouts than almost anything else. Put it in the same space as the music and people can get a drink, talk to friends and still remain part of the party. Put it down a corridor, through a doorway or in another building and you create a second gravitational centre. Someone goes for a drink, bumps into an old friend, another person joins them and forty minutes later a substantial percentage of the wedding has quietly established a new civilisation beside the gin. There's nothing wrong with that — people are allowed to talk at weddings — but if they can no longer hear or see what's happening on the dancefloor, it becomes much harder for the party to pull them back.
That's why I think of the room as part of the DJ setup. The speakers, lighting and music don't arrive in some neutral box; they're entering a space that is already influencing everybody inside it. My job is partly to work with that. Make the sound suit the room. Use lighting to enhance what's already there rather than smother it. Create enough open space for people to move. Understand where the natural gathering points are and, where possible, make the dancefloor one of them. You don't need to notice any of this on the night. In fact, I'd prefer you didn't. But once you've done enough weddings, you stop seeing venues simply as backdrops. You start seeing all the little ways the room is nudging the party in one direction or another.
Related Articles:
How Does A Wedding DJ Actually Get People Dancing?
The Little Things You Probably Won't Notice About Your Wedding DJ
Your Wedding Doesn't Need To Look Like A Wedding (My War On Tackiness and Clutter).
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