“Small festivals may be able to handle this smoothly, but the big boys like Lowlands, Pinkpop and Down the Rabbit Hole, where many people come together, can’t do anything with this,” says Schans about the new measures.
Health minister Hugo de Jonge and Prime Minister Mark Rutte will announce Friday evening, according to The Hague sources, that events may receive less public in the coming month and that everyone must sit. “You can only organize a festival like Lowlands at full capacity.”
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Lowlands falls outside the period for which the cabinet is now announcing stricter measures, but the chance that the festival will continue seems small. Construction has already started in Biddinghuizen, so costs are already being incurred. “Lowlands is planned a week after August 13, if the measures are reviewed again. It is not possible to race on that.”
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Now that it seems that the festival summer is coming to an end for the second year in a row, the situation is becoming dire for many organizers. “There are going to be blows, there are really going to be festivals,” says Schans. “Festivals are a small society, an economy in themselves. There are 250 employers involved in a large festival and they are all dependent on each other. Our sector is much larger than KLM, for example. We keep a lot of people at work, including suppliers and many zzp. The reserves have already been reorganized and used up. Now it is really getting very squeezed.”
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Schans calls the new measures “spicy” and “really painful”. “It is considerable. And that while the Field Labs have shown that there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing things according to a strict protocol.” The VNPF director also thinks that canceling festivals “makes no sense”. “The cork is off the bottle, young people are going to visit each other this summer. It is better to do that in a controlled manner in a club, pop stage or at a festival site than elsewhere.”
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