Festivals: Where the Colours are Brighter
Waiting for a festival is really an anticipation of the whimsy, the desire to be surrounded by music and free-flowing bodies, and to strip oneself of external anxieties and pressures.
This release is often talked about as escapism. But as Theo Parish once put it so accurately: “Escapism has always been an adjective used to describe the dance. That is an outsider’s view: Solidarity is what it really offers.” A love for the lineup and a perpetual smile become the common equaliser, regardless of what was weighing each dancer prior to setting foot on the field. And amongst our dancefloor companions, connected in the spirituality of dancing, it becomes clear that indeed, rather than an escape, we are re-learning how to be human.
This past summer, I had the privilege to attend two multi-day music festivals – Waking Life and We Out Here – both justifying why we anxiously wait for those days dancing under the sun and the moon, guided by the bass line. Waking Life can be best described as a seven-day immersive psychedelic dreamscape, where the love and attention to detail could bring anyone with an appreciation for the human touch to tears. In an age of automation and abundance of the generic, noticing the placement of every light bulb across what felt like a magical forest was truly mesmerising. We Out Here brings some of the best music in the broad spectrum that is the
jazz umbrella, for a magical weekend celebrating artists from all corners of the globe. The only imperative one cannot escape is locking in on the dance floor.
Festivals do not serve for us to escape the world. They return us to it, more open, more empathic, and more connected.
Across cultures and centuries, communities have gathered around music, dance, seasonal change, and collective ritual, temporarily stepping outside the routines and hierarchies of everyday life. Contemporary festivals do not all descend from one single tradition, but they preserve this ancient desire to synchronise our bodies, build community, and belong to something larger than ourselves. A widely known example is Woodstock, which, held against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and American counterculture, brought together 400,000 people connecting through an explicit political drive for peace. Coming forward to recent years, Waking Life operates under an eco-communitarian ethos, in which it is much more likely to
encounter a dancer picking up a third-party cigarette butt from the floor and putting it in their reusable ashtray than it is to spot someone using a plastic bottle. These outcomes are not accidental - they are a result of shared norms, communal participation, and intention, and give us a glimpse of what communities can look like when rooted in collective care.
These gatherings provide an intensification of the senses. By suspending time and duty, they teach us to pay attention to music, bodies, strangers and the living world.
Looking back to my festival season, one of my fondest moments was at Waking Life, when my friends and I were watching the sunset by the lake at the Praia stage, to the beats of Natalie Escobar. The pinks and oranges were merging with the blue sky, perfectly reflecting in the slow-moving waters, and we were so taken aback that we started clapping, and the group next to us joined, and so did the others until over one hundred people were all cheering the sun’s performance. We were thanking it for its service guiding our gaze while the music guided our heartbeats, and we guided each other.
Another treasured memory is from the last day at We Out Here, when we wandered in a moment of soft, low-energy to the Sanctuary area, sitting under tall trees offering protection from the heat. One by one, we started laying down, resting on each other, until we formed a puddle of cuddles. And there we stayed for a couple of hours to the sound of our laughs, until we picked ourselves up and conserved that energy through Stereolab’s set.
This is where the transformative power of festivals lies. They are the spaces where we make uninterrupted time to realise that all clouds have different textures, where a track list becomes a guide to the expansion of the human form, and where we reconnect with our child-like curiosity and silliness, blast giggles and distribute free hugs. These are the days when the colours are brighter, and the earth is alive, becoming abundantly clear that music can connect us to ourselves, each other, and the planet.
