Dispatch from the Inaugural Spring Awakening Festival at Soldier Field
By chicago-pipeline at June 18, 2012 | 3:15 pm | Print
Spring Awakening, Chicago’s first dance music festival, took place at Soldier Field (1410 South Museum Campus Drive) this past weekend.
Chicago Tribune‘s David Drake called the two day program featuring acts on four stages an unquestionable success.
The Pipeline popped by on Sunday night to catch headliners Moby and Afrojack.
The field was packed. The stands, not so much.
The approx. 20,000 attendees were dancing as close as possible to the stage, save for the fans with the glowing hula hoops who congregated closer to the south end of the field where they had more room to practice their craft.
Electronic dance music, or EDM, or techno, or just stuff that people mixed together years ago before it was called anything specific, has risen to be a musical category that, as the New Yorker says, defies description, while simultaneously drawing massive stadium-packing crowds.
Whereas Thom Yorke of Radiohead said last week that, “I’m going to try out another new song, since we’re all here,” and the fans waited patiently on their blankets on the lawn, DJ Afrojack simply announced– and we’re paraphrasing– something like, “Ready for some awesome new shit?!!” and the crowd went wild as thumping bass reverbrated into the summer sky and some sort of contraption sprinkled water over everyone, which wasn’t needed for Saturday night’s show featuring Skrillex when a natural and sudden rainstorm cooled everyone off.
Bottled water was almost $5 a pop, thus the lines at the free water fountains were longer than the ones at the bathrooms, so it looked like everyone was staying hydrated in the 90–degree heat.
Logan Square’s Congress Theater co-produced Spring Awakening with React Presents, an event management and production company founded in 2009 which puts on the Labor Day weekend North Coast Music Festival in Union Park.
“For the first year, we are very happy with the results and we are looking forward to next year and beyond,” Eddie Carranza, owner of the Congress Theater, said earlier today when reached by phone to discuss the weekend’s show.
For more photos, check out the pipeline’s Facebook album.
