With a budget of around 200 million crowns, this year’s Colors of Ostrava will be the most expensive in the 20 years of the festival’s existence. Its director Zlata Holušová announced this on Thursday.
It will be the first year since the investment group Rockaway Capital became a strategic partner of the event. She acquired a majority stake in the company that Colors organizes. The Rockaway portfolio already includes the Karlovy Vary film festival or the Euromedia Group publishing house, including the Luxor bookstore network.
According to Zlata Holušová, the festival, after surviving the pandemic and the energy crisis, strongly feels inflation. “Band fees, technology, musical equipment, everything went up by more than tens of percent,” the director enumerates. According to her, while until recently some bands asked for a fee of 500,000 euros, today it is easily a million euros, or almost 24 million crowns. “People want bigger and bigger stars, but they don’t realize how expensive those stars are,” adds Holušová.
The biggest change for this year’s visitors is the fact that Colors will become a completely cashless festival. It will therefore be possible to pay only with payment cards, smartphones or watches everywhere in the area for the whole four days. The sales points will not accept cash at all, the organizers emphasize.
“It is clear to us that this is a big change, but we believe that the visitors will appreciate it, as at many other events,” says Zlata Holušová, according to whom card payments make the service faster and more convenient. At the same time, there will be no queues at ATMs.
It will not be a so-called closed cashless system, where people would have to upload money to the chip. “You will pay with your own card. You will not have to upload money anywhere in advance or during the event, and of course you will not have to request a refund after the event,” assures the director. The cashless system in the Czech Republic is used, for example, by the festivals Let it Roll, Brutal Assault or Rock for People.
The organizers of Colors of Ostrava: from left, executive director Petra Řezníčková, dramaturg Filip Košťálek and director Zlata Holušová. | Photo: CTK
This year, from July 19 to 22, over 40 domestic performers and almost 70 foreign ones will perform in the industrial area of Ostrava’s Dolní Vítkovice. They will come from thirty countries. “In 20 years, Colors of Ostrava has developed from a small festival into one of the largest in all of Europe. Everywhere we go, we feel great prestige. From this comes a great responsibility to bring a quality program,” thinks Zlata Holušová.
Dramaturgy prepared many genres from world music, rock, pop, electronics, neoclassical, punk, jazz, hip hop to, for example, soul. The main stars will be the American band OneRepublic, the British singer Ellie Goulding and the rapper Macklemore. Also performing will be Niall Horan, who is a former member of One Direction, Brazilian music star Gilberto Gil on his farewell tour, or the British duo Sleaford Mods.
For the first time in the Czech Republic, the 31-year-old Nigerian singer Burna Boy, global ambassador of African music and Grammy winner, will perform with a nineteen-member ensemble of musicians and dancers.
Among the Czech performers, Ewa Farna will sing, for whom this will be the biggest festival concert of the season with 18 players on stage, as well as Ben Cristovao with a unique stage set or the bands Monkey Business, Zrní and Vypsaná fixa, or singers Lenka Dusilová and Vlasta Redl. As part of the theater program at Colors, Municipal Theaters in Prague will present David Bowie’s musical Lazarus with Igor Orozovic in the lead role.
A new German dance music producer, who performs under the pseudonym Purple Disco Machine, has also been added to the program. Colors will wrap up his performance on Saturday night.
In parallel with the festival, the sixth year of the Meltingpot international discussion forum will take place. Over 200 speakers from all over the world and many fields, from science and politics to culture to social life, will present themselves on 11 stages.
The main stars of Meltingpot are to include the British sleep expert Matthew Walker, whose book Why We Sleep was published in Czech five years ago by Jan Melvil Publishing, or the provocative American-Israeli novelist Tuvia Tenenbom.
Video: “Like A Savior” from Ellie Goulding’s new album
British singer Ellie Goulding will present her recently released album including the single Like A Savior at this year’s Colors. Photo: Madison Phipps | Video: Universal Music
