EXIT Music Festival: A Wild Party for a Good Cause
[caption id=”attachment_7490" align=”alignleft” width=”392"]
Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_(festival)#/media/File: Fireworks,_Petrovaradin_fortress,_2015.jpg[/caption]
EXIT just announced the opener for its Summer 2016 music festival, to be held July 7–10, and it is none other than Ellie Goulding. Known for colossal hits like “Burn” and “Love Me Like You Do,” Goulding is only one of the superstars in this year’s EXIT lineup, which is set to include Bastille (“Pompeii”), Wiz Khalifa (“See You Again”), Lost Frequencies (“Are You With Me”), and Robin Schulz (“Prayer in C”).
EXIT is an annual summer music festival that takes place in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, which is located in the north of the country, on the Danube River. The festival was first held in 2000, and in its first iteration was as much a political protest as a music festival, speaking out against Slobodan Milošević’s regime with the slogan, “Exit out of ten years of madness.” Held on stages set up between the University of Novi Sad and the banks of the Danube, the first festival lasted nearly one hundred days and ended just before the September 24 elections signaled the downfall of the Milošević regime.
Since 2001, EXIT has had a more conventional length, lasting less than a week. It is now one of Europe’s most important music events, and in 2013 it won the “Best European Major Festival Award.” Over the years it has hosted over 2.7 million people from over sixty different countries. Notable past acts have included Guns N’ Roses, Snoop Dogg, Billy Idol, Korn, Arctic Monkeys, Beastie Boys, Skrillex, The White Stripes, and countless others.
Also starting in 2001, the festival has been held in and around Petrovaradin Fortress, on the banks of the Danube. Parts of the fortress date back to the middle ages, and it was the site of important battles in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The festival’s main stage, where the headliner acts play, is located right inside the fortress, and accommodates over thirty-five thousand people. However, EXIT features a multitude of other stages, including the Dance Arena, which fits over twenty-five thousand and features famous DJs, the Explosive Stage, (intended for Punk, Metal, and other intense music), the Fusion Stage, (which showcases Serbian and international acts outside the global mainstream), and a number of smaller, themed stages including No Sleep Novi Sad, Silent Disco, Positive Vibration Reggae, Latino, and others.
In 2014, EXIT added a second component, the smaller Sea Dance Festival, which is held just after the completion of the EXIT festival, at Jaz Beach in Montenegro. In 2015, it was voted Best European Medium-Sized Festival. This summer, it will feature Lost Frequencies, Andy C, Zomboy, and others.
In spite of its immense commercial success, and in spite of having achieved its original political goals many years ago, EXIT remains engaged with humanitarian concerns. The EXIT Foundation, founded in 2010, works mainly with the youth of Novi Sad, assisting students and student organizations with academic projects, and offering college scholarships. The EXIT foundation also assists with disaster relief. When floods devastated the Balkans in May of 2014, EXIT both made a large donation of goods and sent hundreds of people to assist flood victims.
EXIT’s humanitarian efforts and its music festival are not mutually exclusive, either. The festival itself maintains an emphasis on political awareness, and includes panels and workshops on tolerance, human rights, and environmental concerns. Even the trailer for this coming summer’s festival features a rhetoric of music and love saving the world from darker forces — a more sensational expression of its concrete efforts to improve the lives of the people of its country and others, and to foster goodwill between Serbia and the rest of the world.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_(festival)
