The recital your school has been working towards all year.

Used by UK dance schools, including ISTD, RAD, and IDTA-affiliated studios running ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary, modern, theatre dance, street dance, and Irish dance. The annual recital is the headline event, usually staged at a hired regional theatre with reserved seating in stalls and circle, and Seaty is built around that pattern rather than a one-off festival booking. The hired venue is often the same one used by the local amateur dramatic society for its annual production, or by a resident independent theatre hosting both. The school stays in control of the front-of-house hand-off to the venue's resident team. Free for schools taking payment outside the platform through bank transfer or cash at the studio, with an optional flat fee on online card payments.

Sketch the hired theatre as a visual plan, mark the hearing-aid loop row and accessible seats, and let families pick the seats that actually work for who is sitting in them. Free to start, no card needed. Worth skimming our guide on reserved versus general admission first if you are weighing it up against a free-seating recital.

A Stripe Checkout button takes a card payment. That is the entire feature. It does not know that grandma needs the aisle seat near the toilets, that this family has already used four of their six member-rate tickets, that the programme has every dancer's name and photograph in it, or that the same eighty students are dancing across three performances on one weekend.

Most ticketing platforms haven't thought about a recital at all. If you're running a Saturday matinee, Saturday evening, and Sunday matinee with the same students, they treat each as a standalone event. Three separate seating plans to maintain. Three separate family allocations to track. Three separate orders for a family attending all three shows, three card-not-present fees, three confirmation emails to the same grandparent. And most charge per-ticket fees on every order. For a recital where the average family books five tickets, that's £5 in fees before the studio has earned a penny on the programme.

Seaty was built around the way a UK dance school actually runs its recital:

The grandma seat, the hearing-aid loop, and the toilets. Reserved seating on a visual plan of the hired theatre, with accessible seats marked clearly, so families pick the seats that work for whoever is sitting in them — not whoever clicks first. Grandma sits where she needs to sit, every time. See our guide on reserved versus general admission for the decision context.

The same students across three performances on one weekend. Saturday matinee, Saturday evening, Sunday matinee, one shared roster, one plan template, one production. A family books different seats for different performances based on which side of the family is attending which, and nothing breaks.

Family allocations at member rate. Each family gets four to six tickets at member rate, with additional tickets at full price. The platform handles the price step when the family books their seventh ticket for the extra godparent. No more end-of-recital arguments about who got the better seats.

The programme as the headline keepsake. The recital programme is the most-loved keepsake of a child's young dance career. Photo packages, recital flowers, USB sticks of the show, and branded merchandise sit alongside it on the same order. Families pay for everything in one go, not three times.

Choreography videos shared with the dancers, not the audience. Class-scoped video and audio sharing through the app, with pinned moments for tricky sections and offline access for the train home from the studio. Students actually practise at home, instead of asking the principal at the next class. Stripe Checkout cannot do this. Most ticketing platforms have no concept of it.

Free if the school is taking payments itself. Most dance schools still take a meaningful share of payment by bank transfer or in cash at the studio. Seaty is free in that case, with the seating plans, family allocations, scanning, file sharing, and reporting all available. Per-ticket fees on every sale are the wrong shape for a school that already runs on tight margins. See how UK ticketing fees actually work for the breakdown.

A dance school recital sits in the same world as several other Seaty audiences. The parent base overlaps with primary and secondary schools running shows and concerts. The same family will book your recital in May and the school's summer production in July. The hired regional theatre is often the same building used by the local amateur dramatic society for its annual production, and resident independent theatres regularly host both. Before building this year's recital, it is worth reading our guides on setting up a seating plan for the hired-theatre layout and reserved versus general admission for the decision context on whether to allocate seats at all.

The pattern is much the same: a hired venue, reserved seating, member quotas, comps held back, programmes on the foyer table. The amateur theatre overview covers the same ground from the production side, in case any of it applies to how the school runs its recital or shares a venue with the local company.