Finding a new festival niche
As Something in the Water moves to DC, what comes next for Hampton Roads?
At his State of the City address earlier this year, Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer announced that the resort city would soon be home to the Jackalope Festival, a multiday action-sports event that will feature skateboarding, BMX, surfing and other extreme sports.
His announcement exuded pride, with good reason, as it will be a new foray that will bring visitors and their entertainment dollars to the city. But absent in that announcement was any mention of Something in the Water and the Patriotic Festival, which moved their events elsewhere.
For a region that depends in no small measure on tourism revenue, these changes to the landscape represent more than simply losing two weekends of music, fun and frolicking on the beach. They could mean fewer occupied hotel rooms, fewer meals served at area restaurants and a hit to Hampton Roads’ bottom line.
This week, Pharrell Williams announced he would hold his Something in the Water festival in Washington, D.C., to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday. Williams was a vocal proponent of making Juneteenth a state holiday, which Virginia did in 2020, so the timing will help boost recognition of that long-celebrated moment in American history.
But it’s hard to view that decision from this corner of Virginia with anything other than disappointment.
Williams organized the first SITW in 2019 to coincide with College Beach Weekend, providing Virginia Beach the structured programming suggested by a study to entertain thousands of young people who already planned to visit.
After the pandemic scuttled festival plans in 2020 and 2021, Williams announced in October that he would move the event from Virginia Beach. He cited the March 2021 shooting that killed his cousin, Donovon Lynch, and accused the city of not contacting the victims’ families for weeks, rejecting his proposal for a community forum and said Virginia Beach was “run by — and with toxic energy.”
Organizers of the Patriotic Festival said it was a “business decision” to relocate to
Norfolk after 17 years in Virginia Beach, citing the availability of an indoor option (Scope Arena) in case of inclement weather. That revenue, at least, stays in the region.
Hampton Roads boasts a number of other events: the annual Harborfest in Norfolk routinely brings big-name acts to perform in Town Point Park; Virginia Beach offers freeto-attend music performances throughout the summer in the resort area; Portsmouth held its first 420ish Unity Festival in April; and that’s far from an exhaustive list.
But SITW was something different, an event with national appeal which earned considerable attention given the wattage of star power on display. And it was modeled after the incredibly successful South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, which features hundreds of music and film performances as well as panel discussions and other events throughout the city.
The region now lacks that sort of keystone event. Organizing something similar absent someone like Williams seems a tall order.
Worth noting: Communities such as Atlantic City and Gulf Shores, Alabama, have tapped into a lucrative market by holding concerts on their beaches, in the same style as the SITW festival in 2019. Major touring acts, which can draw huge crowds and often bypass Virginia for want of a large enough venue, sell thousands of tickets to those performances.
Could something like that work here? Certainly it would require considerable heavy lifting on the part of the city, tourism officials, promoters and organizers, as well as residents. But SITW showed what can happen when everyone pulls in the same direction.
Virginia Beach or Hampton Roads may not need those sorts of large-scale events to generate tourism revenue. There are plenty of reasons people come to the beach (the actual beach, for starters) and maybe something like the Jackalope Festival next year will be enough.
Still, come June when SITW kicks off in the streets of the District, it will be hard to avoid thinking about what could have been, and it will be essential to apply that energy toward what we can build next.