Perkbox: Company All-Hands
The brief was to end a strong year differently, with a Christmas party noticeably unlike anything the team had experienced before.
The client asked for high production value, genuine creative ambition, and entertainment that would hold a room. They chose the Discovery Museum in Newcastle as the venue and handed the creative direction to us.
A museum is an unusual corporate event venue, and that is precisely what makes it difficult. Discovery Museum is not configured for dining, entertainment staging, or cabaret-style performance. Everything, from staging and lighting to sound and catering infrastructure, had to be brought in and configured from scratch inside a heritage space with its own physical constraints.
The entertainment brief was unusually broad. Burlesque dancers, aerial performers, a hula hoop artist, live jazz vocalists, and a jazz band all had to serve the same evening. They had to function as a coherent cabaret programme, not a run of unrelated acts. In a dinner theatre format, entertainment and dining have to be sequenced so neither works against the other. Guests cannot eat a three-course meal and watch an aerial performance at the same time. The 1920s Paris concept also needed a custom sound environment, period-appropriate music that could work across five distinct acts and hold atmosphere through the whole evening. It could not come from a stock playlist. It had to be built for this event.
We did not pick a venue and theme it. We picked a venue whose character did half the work, then built everything else to match it.
We took on full creative direction and production delivery. The Discovery Museum was chosen for its architectural character and scale, because a heritage venue gives a period concept a physical foundation a purpose-built event space cannot. The transformation involved period set dressing and lighting designed to evoke a Parisian jazz club, with the room laid out specifically for the dinner theatre format. The soundtrack was produced in-house by our team, blending period-appropriate music across the full programme so the audio held consistent with the theme from arrival to close.
The entertainment was programmed as a proper cabaret bill: burlesque dancers, live jazz vocalists, a jazz band, aerial performers and a hula hoop artist. Each act was selected and scheduled to serve a different moment in the evening's energy arc. Dinner and performance were sequenced so the set pieces had the room's full attention, with dining running between acts rather than alongside them.
The event produced the highest engagement and satisfaction scores the client had recorded on their annual employee survey
Following the event, the client engaged us to manage their entire events calendar on an exclusive basis. That decision is the proof that carries weight here. A single strong night earns a thank you. Handing over a full calendar is a different kind of trust.
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This was a celebration moment. See how we design company celebrations.
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