LAS VEGAS – The Parnelli Board of Advisors has announced that Yvan Miron will receive the Parnelli Visionary Award at the 18th annual ceremony in Anaheim, CA on Jan. 25, 2019.
“Yvan’s innovation has had a tremendously positive effect on live entertainment, allowing for events to go up in places traditional stages can’t, and do it everywhere faster and safer,” says Terry Lowe, Parnelli Awards executive producer and publisher of PLSN and FRONT of HOUSE magazines. “From his earliest mobile stages in the 1980s to his recent SAM 750, he’s been relentless in achieving his goal of making safer stage choices are available for every occasion. Through it all he’s been a beacon of dedication to the environment, from creating stages that require a significantly less carbon footprint to his second plant in Montreal which is built with advanced geothermal technology.”
Today, Stageline stages are in 45 countries and used for 20,000 events a year, and the company’s rental fleet is 115 stages strong. Miron’s products are designed to go beyond current industry safety standards, which he believes to be too lax, and he’s proud to report that, since he started building mobile stages in the 1980s, there has not been a single casualty. “Ever since I started, I wanted to build to building codes, and we test our models to handle twice the working load. If regulations say it needs to take a ton, we build it to take two.”
Miron, born in Montreal, was a musician before becoming a promoter and a producer of regional live events. Quebec’s sudden and drastic weather changes caused many challenges, and like most visionaries, Miron acted on his belief that there must be a better way. After starting to put together mobile stages in the 1980s, he formed Stageline in 1988. He conquered an early challenge by creating a mobile stage light enough to stay within road weight limits, yet still be heavy and solid enough to withstand high winds. By 1992, he had put together several working mobile stages and he found clients immediately – though not all were immediately receptive. Early on, a promoter in Vermont called on the new company to be part of a Willie Nelson concert. Miron and team pulled up, and questions were asked. “The technical director asked, ‘What is this?’ [of the mobile stage],” Miron recalls. “He tried to say he can’t rig anything on it. I showed him how. I answered all his questions, and then he said, ‘Well, we haven’t seen anything like this,’ but we did the show and sure enough, it flew.” His stages have been sold and rented with great success, and his pioneering use of hydraulics has been revolutionary and continues through to his latest products, including the SAM750, SAM575 and Delay Towers.
“I have known Yvan for many years and have had the pleasure to visit his world-class facility and see first-hand the quality of work done by he and his team,” says Peter Hendrickson of Tour Tech East, a member of the Parnelli Board of Advisors. “He surrounds himself with positive and knowledgeable people that have helped him grow that business to being a true leader in that industry. He had the vision to see the need for portable stages that can be erected and dismantled in short periods of time, with minimal labor costs. Many companies have copied his product, however they are still copies, and when describing portable stages, people call them ‘Stageline-type’ stages. Kind of like what ‘Kleenex’ did for tissue paper and ‘Xerox’ did for photocopying.”
Miron will receive the Parnelli Visionary Award at the 18th annual Parnelli Awards on Jan. 25, 2019 at the Hilton Anaheim located next to the Anaheim Convention Center during NAMM’s annual convention and as part of NAMM Live.
For more information, please visit www.parnelliawards.com.
