Sziget Festival is losing its identity

2015s edition of Sziget Festival was the one the festival was losing its identity once more. There used to be street theatre between the tent A38 and the Main Stage. But this year the programme director of Sziget decided to replace the big street theatre by Fuerza Bruta. The experience – being impressed by surprise while walking from one stage to another one was completely gone as you had to queue this year to enter the venue of Fuerza Bruta. Also the street theatre on top of the front of house of the Main Stage wasn’t there anymore. This was something which made Sziget rather unique as there used to be cultural entertainment of high quality near the Main Stage in between two sets.

This kind of entertainment was ‘replaced’ by stages of Axe and Bacardi. This last sponsor was according to our editor in chief too visible at the festival site. The only commercial partner of Sziget which was present at the festival site and managed to maintain the unique atmosphere of the festival in its promotional stand was ‘H&M loves music’ and their lovely carousel.

“We haven’t given so many one and one and a half stars for concerts during a festival as we did this year at Sziget” says editor in chief Bert Hertogs of Concertnews.be. The level of the concerts and dj sets of the headliners at the Main Stage was rather moderate. Also other stages didn’t make the difference. In fact Ella Eyres gig in the A38 tent was one of the few which completely satisfied us and even more than that. True, 2015s festival season doesn’t have a lot of real headliner artists who can manage to give an interesting set of one hour and a half with a great attention span and variations.

Watching temporary sculptures (e.g. the eggs, the spaceship with the teddy bear, …) just being put in the park somewhere it seemed the production didn’t know which place would fit best so the works would be as visible as possible for the visitors.

Sziget gave a headlining position to 5 star circus Klaxon by Akoreacro at Cirque du Sziget which we already saw 2 years ago at Zomer van Antwerpen in Belgium. This raises the question if Sziget has to program “best of” shows and productions which are running for a lot of years now, or should Sziget invest its money in new productions? Asking the question is also answering it.

Conclusion: Sziget became more commercial in 2015 (because of its programming and skipping some cultural entertainment and also because the festival gave more space for their commercial sponsors and VIPs), Sziget also raised the number of visitors to 90 000 per day who could visit the island.

Concertnews.be visited Sziget for the first time in 2013. We are concerned about the festival losing its unique identity in the European festival market. We tend to give our vote for “Best Major European Festival 2015” to Glastonbury Festival this year which still manages to keep its unique atmosphere, a hippie atmosphere, giving their (commercial) partners some space too to act, but not as many as Sziget gave theirs this year.

< Bert Hertogs >