Katy Perry floats in the basket of a hot air balloon above the crowd to the level, her orange wig in the wind as she greets the spectators below. Cheers and cries of flattery traverse the main level with arrows and two giant waterfalls, a kind of futuristic castle of Neuschwanstein and Disneyfied. The pink headlights flash when Perry starts betting her first song, “Smile”, during the purely virtual first edition of the Tomorrowland festival.
Perry’s functionality was recorded in a studio on a green screen and digitally transposed into one of the 8 butterfly-shaped virtual island scenes of ‘Pili-nem’. The face-to-face edition of Tomorrowland (top left), which takes place in Boom, Belgium, had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ticket holders can explore the virtual island of the festival created for the occasion online (top right). Over two months, some two hundred workers cheered a global with beaches, sunsets, Northern Lights, 32,000 trees and 280,000 virtual people, some waving flags, whistling and clapping performances.
Tomorrowland, one of the largest electronic dance music festivals in Europe, attracts some 400,000 more people. According to the organizers, more than a million festival attendees clicked on the virtual island. With a daily price ticket that costs only 12.50 euros ($14.70), the virtual solution has allowed many other people around the world to make a stop at the festival for the first time.
The stars made wonderful efforts to record animated sets. French DJ David Guetta says that when he filmed his set, he imagined that the studio’s 15 workers were the 100,000 enthusiasts he needed to get in the mood.
But the feeling of festival is inevitably absent when you look at the screen on a computer at home: the dynamics of thousands of people celebrating, the bass beat in the mouth of the stomach, the painted faces.
While not the best replacement for a live event, Tomorrowland’s cutting-edge online edition is one of the many artistic responses that major festivals have invented to fill the void created by coronavirus closures this summer.
The German Wacken Open Air festival (left, a year earlier) is one of many musical occasions cancelled due to a coronavirus, leaving the old man naked (right).
The British Glastonbury Festival had planned extravagant celebrations for its 50th anniversary in June. Some 135,000 tickets sold out in an hour. Instead, festival-goers were limited to online videos from previous editions of Glastonbury. Some have turned their circle of gardens and family rooms into festival venues.
The Roskilde Festival in Denmark challenged its enthusiasts to celebrate this year’s Do-It-Yourself festival, providing commands for craft and poster installations, music playlists and recipe ideas. Meanwhile, the same old stage of the festival, which featured bands such as the Rolling Stones and Muse, organized an impromptu verification center for coronaviruses this year.
Major festivals outside Europe have also been cancelled. The Mawazine festival attracts 2.75 million viewers each year in Rabat, Morocco, making it arguably the world’s largest music festival. It was cancelled this year without any form of replacement.
The Coachella Festival in California, one of the world’s most famous music festivals, was postponed from April to October before the fitness administration completely canceled the event.
While coronavirus cases continue in the United States, the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada and the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago were also canceled. The latter will be replaced through a virtual occasion from July 30 to August 2, with performances and recordings of concerts from later years.
But the summer months are not only full of famous music festivals; Germany has a lot of small local festivals that are a cultural contribution in rural areas. According to a report by associations in the German music industry, many festivals may have to close due to monetary losses caused by coronavirus.
Take the Haldern Pop Festival. It consisted of three teams when it was introduced in 1984 in the quiet village of Haldern. By 2020, some 60 bands and solo artists were scheduled to perform at the award-winning independent festival. A total of about 7,000 tickets were nearly sold out when it became clear that primary events, in addition to Haldern Pop, would be banned in Germany until 31 August.
The same usual crowds at the Haldern Pop festival (left) had to stay home this year, leaving the city visibly empty (right).
Faced with a global pandemic, fear of Haldern Pop is not the first priority, said the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, but it’s the most complicated time in the festival’s history.
Unlike Tomorrowland, Haldern Pop doesn’t have two hundred workers who can find a solution. But with his core team of a handful of people, Reichmann controlled the organization of a live concert. It is scheduled to take place on 7 August in Haldern and Dingle, Ireland.
Most people who already had valuable tickets donated all or part of the valuable tickets to the festival. This allowed the organizers to reach the end of the month until 2021. I mean, what happens after that, Reichmann said.
The podcast, the first of a partnership between Obama’s company, Higher Ground and the Spotify streaming service, arrives at a time of ongoing civil unrest. Barack Obama is the first guest on July 29.