The festival anticipation can begin: Jera On Air in Ysselsteyn and Solar Weekend in Roermond, among others, are preparing for full festival fields.
Sjoerd Ewals from Jera On Air and Danielle Smeets from Solar talk about it in the L1 program The Pre-Program.
Innovations
Much of the line-up of the Roermond festival has been moved, but there are also changes. ‘The inner village comes back to Solar,’ says Danielle Smeets, project manager at Solar. ‘The little things, the local artists: in recent years I kind of missed that you could do something different in every corner of the site. We now want to bring that back, we spend a lot of time on that.”
To invest
Sjoerd Ewals is chairman and head of programming at Jera On Air. The organization has used the corona period to invest in the punk and metal festival. “It will be a completely new site. The campsite is next to it and the parking lot is next to it, that was a bit off at first,” says Ewals. “And the main stage opens on Thursday, so we’ve got the program big with extra headliners. I’m looking forward to a big crowd going wild with acts like The Offspring and The Hives.”
Staff
The corona measures have been abolished, but the organizations are still noticing the consequences of the lockdown period. For example, it remains difficult to find sufficient staff. Sjoerd Ewals: “We work with volunteers, but we do notice that there is a shortage on the market with external parties. Now that everything is possible again, there is a lot of demand and prices have risen. These are developments that you have to work with .”
Also read: Personnel problems at festivals: ‘They work elsewhere’
Danielle Smeets of Solar agrees. “You notice it in, for example, security and bar staff. I hear from those organizations that they have to pull out all the stops to draw people back into the labor market. Many people have started doing something else.”
The Support Act
The Voorprogramma is a talk show by Pop in Limburg and L1 about the Limburg music sector. The full episode is here to watch.