LED performer hire in Australia: the complete guide

LED acts are what fire performers do when the venue says no. Same skills, same tools, same people in many cases, with battery powered lights in place of wicks and fuel. And that swap opens doors that fire never gets through: function rooms, marquees, ballrooms, shopping centres, anywhere with a sprinkler head or a lease that mentions naked flame.

One condition decides whether the booking is worth the money. The room has to be dark. The prices below are live from the LED acts listed on this site, but no quote is good value for a set performed under full house lights at four in the afternoon.

City by city, the live figures sit in the table below. A solo performer doing a couple of short sets sits at the lower end. Group choreography, glowing costumes and an LED screen suit that plays video move the price up quickly, because that gear is expensive to buy and needs charging, programming and maintaining between jobs.

There's a useful middle option a lot of people miss: booking LED roving rather than a staged show. Performers moving through a darkened room in glowing costume for an hour costs less than a choreographed feature and often photographs better, because every guest gets close to it instead of watching from twenty metres back.

Programmable LEDs look extraordinary in a dim room and almost invisible under bright white light. So before you book, work out what the lighting will actually be at the moment the set happens. A ballroom with the chandeliers on full, a marquee at six in the evening in January, a daytime shopping centre atrium: none of those give you the act you saw in the video.

The fix is usually easy and just needs agreeing in advance. The venue drops the house lights for the set, the DJ kills the white wash, someone shuts a blind. Five minutes of dark is all it takes. Put it in the run sheet and tell whoever controls the lighting desk, because an act this dependent on one thing shouldn't be left to chance.

It goes indoors. It works in a marquee, on a stage, in a space with sprinklers, on carpet, near curtains and around children without a safety line. It needs no fuel, no extinguisher, no permit and no exclusion zone, which means it can perform among your guests rather than at a distance from them.

It can also be programmed. Pixel poi and LED staffs display patterns, words and logos mid spin, and corporate clients use that to put a brand or a message into a show. If you want that, say so early. It's programming work before the event, not something anyone improvises on the night.

The category covers a wide spread of equipment. At the simple end, glowing props with a handful of colours. In the middle, pixel props with programmed patterns and full light up costumes with wings or hoops. At the top, LED screen suits playing video, which are a genuine spectacle and priced like one.

Look hard at the photographs on each profile, because the difference between tiers is obvious in a picture in a way it never is in a description. And check the footage was shot in a room like yours. A prop that dazzles in a pitch black studio can look ordinary in a function room with the exit signs glowing.

Everything runs on batteries and batteries run out. Performers manage this well, but it shapes the booking: sets are typically shorter than fire sets, there's a charging window between them, and they'll want a power point somewhere backstage. Ask how many sets the kit supports before anyone needs to swap batteries.

If your event is long, book two shorter sets with a gap rather than one long continuous one. You get a stronger performance both times, the batteries hold up, and you give the room two moments instead of one. That's usually better value from the same fee anyway.

How dark does the room need to be for this to work? How long is a set on one charge, and how many sets can you do? Do you also perform this with fire, and if so which version suits our venue? Can you program a logo or a message, and what do you need from us to do it? And how much floor space do you need for the tools you'll be spinning?

The fire question is worth asking even when you've already decided against fire. Performers who do both will tell you honestly which version suits your space, and sometimes the answer is a fire set outside at the start and LED inside later.