Facts About Defqon.1 Festival
Defqon.1 Weekend Festival is an annual music festival held in the Netherlands, Chile and Australia. It was founded in 2003 by festival organizer Q-dance. The festival plays mostly hardstyle and related genres such as hardcore techno, hard house and hard trance.
Events
The festival was previously held in mid-June on Almeerderstrand in Almere. Since 2011 it is hosted on the event site next to Walibi Holland in Biddinghuizen. Since 2009 the event has also been hosted in Sydney in mid-September, at the Sydney International Regatta Centre. Until 2011 (2014 for the Australian edition) the festival ran for 12 hours, from 11:00 am to 11:00 pm, and ended with a firework display. Since 2012, the festival was extended to three days. Since 2015, the Australian edition was extended to two days. Each edition also has an anthem, an official song that is played in conjunction with the festival. The festival is also livestreamed with video from the largest stages and audio for all the other stages through YouTube, and the Q-Dance website for people all around the world to tune into.
At the Dutch event the audience has grown to 65,000 per day with tickets sometimes selling out in less than an hour. In 2013, the Sydney event attracted 18,000 attendees. The same event saw the death of a male, around 20 drug overdoses and more than 80 arrested on drug charges.
On 17 September 2018, the New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, announced her intention that Defqon.1 would never again take place in the state, due to two deaths that took place at the 2018 festival. At this event seven hundred people sought medical assistance. Shane Rattenbury, the Greens leader in the ACT, has invited Defqon.1 to take place in Canberra where pill testing could be carried out after a successful trial with Groovin the Moo.
On 29 May 2019, Q-dance announced on its official Facebook profiles that Defqon.1 Australia, after a decade being held at the Sydney International Regatta Centre (Penrith), would be indefinitely suspended, since they were "unable to secure a suitable replacement venue for the event to take place "
2020 will not see Defqon.1 happening after the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte declared that all events in the Netherlands will be cancelled until September 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The same theme will be reused in the 2021 edition.
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