You might be wearing not as many layers of clothes at this year’s Oppikoppi festival as an even better line-up will have you dancing the days and nights away.
This is because the annual event has been moved to October and the musical extravaganza has teamed up with the Rocking the Daisies Music and Lifestyle Festival. This collaboration and change of the acclaimed festival from August to two months later was announced yesterday.
When Oppikoppi started in 1994, it attracted only hundreds of people.
But over the years, thousands of people flocked to the dusty terrains of Northam in Limpopo in August to start the summer season where more genres of music were introduced to the three-day line-up.
This year’s change of date is again aimed at expansion as organisers said this decision was taken after much debate.
“Over the years, Oppikoppi has become a benchmark festival on the international calendar, and 2016 just made it super clear that we had to be outside of the European summer calendar if we wanted a long-term festival with a strong and relevant South African and international line-up,” the organisers said.
“Moving the festival also opens up a few alluring co-operation opportunities which makes a great deal of sense for South African bands, crews and fans.” Another significant change to this year’s proceedings is the collaboration with the Rocking the Daisies festival as concert goers now have the chance to attend both local events at the same time and now they have access to bigger and better performances and production.
“Working together saves tears and rand. Both festivals are in the middle of management and renewal processes but in time we think this can really become the biggest single weekend of tunes on the Southern African music calendar,” they said.
The theme of the 2017 instalment of the Oppikoppi festival is “Me now, the mango picker”, which is inspired by the tunes of bass jazz maestro Carlo Mombelli. The artwork for the event will be a painting by a Swaziland-born artist who lectures in drawing and art theory at the Tshwane University of Technology. “Keeping up the gruff rock-inspired festival’s support for the fine arts, this year we chose Banele Khoza, a painting to launch a ship with, or of course a sun-drenched rock festival,” they said.
The Oppikoppi festival will be held during the first week of October and band announcements are expected to be made soon.
Early bird tickets are available from Plankton.mobi
@Karishma_Dipa