Setia Festival Hall, Kuala Lumpur

The vision for the Setia Festival Hall was to create a world-class centre for the arts in KL for everyone to enjoy; a receiving house which in due course would commission new work, act as touring hub for national and international companies, provide resources for training, lectures, education and masterclasses, and would potentially become an incubator for new performing arts companies.

Our recommendations for the Setia Festival Hall included building 3 auditoria (1900 seats, 500 seats, and a studio theatre of 250 seats), an art cinema and a contemporary art gallery on this central site adjacent to the main railway station in KL. We also developed the initial business and financial plan for the Hall for the first 10 years’ of operation, which demonstrated how the different elements of the arts centre could work together – the staffing, the operation of the building, the presentation of work on its various stages, the production of new work, as well as its income and its expenditure. The model also allowed for key variables – ticket pricing, the number of performances, the projected box office return, and the size of the audience, to be adjusted as necessary. Due to management changes within S P Setia this project has not yet progressed to the detailed design stage.