Four colleges have secretly been working together to plan a huge festival on campus called Westival, to rival Derwent’s Big D.
York Vision can exclusively reveal that the Halifax, James, Alcuin and Vanbrugh college committees are involved in talks with the University to hold the event. It is understood that Derwent have not been included in the talks.
Organisers hope to hold the mini-festival on June 11, the last Sunday before the end of the year.
Details about the “on-campus club night” will be announced publicly in the next fortnight.
The event will aim to raise money for RAG, will be held at the Roger Kirk Centre, and will feature a stage with big-name bands.
Westival has been given the go-ahead by the University, pending their approval of certain details.
YUSU gave organisers the date of June 11 to avoid threatening Big D, but the colleges are keen to out-do the Derwent event.
This new event will replace Woodstock, which has normally been organised by YUSU, but music will still be played throughout the day.
James College JCRC chair Max Flynn confirmed: “It’s set to be an on campus club night with a big act in the RKC and the whole surrounding area open with various entertainment for charity.”
He said there “shouldn’t be any clash” with Derwent’s consistently popular party because they will be “a couple of weeks” apart. However, Derwent has not yet publicly announced the date of Big D.
That’s a shame. Woodstock is great for anyone who wants to showcase their talent. Don’t want it to be replaced with a few bunch of DJs…
Another note, they’ll do just fine as long as they don’t get shitty Pendulum on again.
Hope they let the media societies know their plans well in advance. URY and YSTV have produced some great coverage of Woodstock over years, but we’ve only been able to manage that thanks to communication between us and the committee.
Little known fact for anyone wanting us to cover a live campus event: it takes us just as much time to plan a broadcast as it does for you to plan your event, if not more! We have to arrange our crew, plan where we’re going to put our equipment, contact the external sound contractors to get audio feeds, spend hours beforehand setting up, spend hours afterwards cleaning up, deal with H&S, room bookings, EMFs, etc…