2017 marks the second iteration for SXM Festival. Overall, the event was really nice. I wasn’t at the first run, so I have no basis of comparison from the year prior, but there was room for improvement.
The Happy Bay venue, site of the day parties, was a lovely beach setting, with a large main stage and a small ocean-facing stage near the water. There was a solid rotation of headliners during the day party, many unfortunately playing to sparse dancefloors. Part of the reason for this was no shade was provided anywhere near the dancefloor, where the sun grew too hot to be dancing for more than a few minutes. A shade structure would have greatly improved the ability to enjoy the daytime sets. The smaller stage ended up having the larger crowd, as its proximity to the ocean, cool breezes, and shade trees allowed dancers to cool off.
I like the festival, I truly do, and I hope for their success and want them to do well, so I say this from a place of love in an attempt to be constructive in my criticism: they had the worst lighting I had ever seen at a festival. On day 1, bright white lights intermittently strobed in the faces of the crowd for the duration of darkness (see video below). If you’ve ever had someone take a flash photo of you at night and could not see for the next few minutes, you’ve experienced the phenomena known as “flash blindness”, which occurs when the light sensing cells in the retina are temporarily overloaded. Now imagine you are facing a stage, and repeatedly blinded by massively powerful lights at eye level, every 10 seconds for the entire night. It is extremely unpleasant and disorienting. On the second night and thereafter, now colored lights trawled across the crowd. These lights were powerful enough that sitting all the way at the opposite end of the festival, on the couches by the food area, my vision was still being knocked out by the lightbeams hitting me in the eye occasionally. This was the most frustrated I’ve ever felt at a festival, and found myself having to wear sunglasses or face away from the lights, where I could then see large numbers of other people wearing sunglasses. At night. Lights (and lasers) should never be shined into people’s faces. Hop to Youtube and notice with Timewarp and Dayzero, for example, the lights are not aimed at eyelevel. SXM Festival, please, please fix this oversight.
Food options were dismal.
Write about the villa party
Happy bay was a great beach
The venues were cool
They did a good job building it
The vendors were cool
And they had some real bathrooms for VIP