University of Wisconsin-Madison students’ lively and noisy May 4 festivity, accompanied by large amounts of alcohol, is rapidly approaching. That’s right, Revelry is coming up! Confused? So are we.
From the moment student leaders began planning Revelry, a new music and arts festival set to occur the same day as the infamous Mifflin Street Block Party, they made a number of mistakes, starting with the name —Revelry literally means, “Lively and noisy festivities, especially when these involve drinking a large amount of alcohol.” In other words: Mifflin. We find ourselves asking, where did Revelry’s planning go wrong and what could have made it better, simultaneously saving its planners a huge public relations headache?
We do not have a problem with the concept behind Revelry. In fact, we think an end-of-the-year music and arts festival is a great idea. As Sarah Mathews, one of Revelry’s primary planners, has said numerous times, this campus does not have a music and arts festival as other college campuses around the country do. Still, here are the problems we have with Revelry in its current form:
The date. We have heard student leaders maintain Revelry is not trying to “kill Mifflin,” and we have no reason to believe they are lying. But no matter the true purpose of Revelry, if it occurs on the same day as Mifflin, students will perceive it as a Mifflin alternative. And why shouldn’t they? The city as well as the university, which has entities sponsoring Revelry, have been searching for a way to end Mifflin for years. With Mifflin’s longstanding tradition, Revelry’s planners should have been more conscientious of how students could perceive the festival’s intentions.
The bands. We understand headlining artists Hoodie Allen, Toro Y Moi and Delta Spirit have a small following, and surely some people on campus are excited to see them. But these are not the headliners we envisioned as we eagerly awaited Revelry’s highly anticipated lineup announcement. In order to make Revelry more attractive than Mifflin, and gain the crowd necessary to make the festival a new tradition, it needed to attract bands the majority of campus enjoys, or at least knows.
The money. Between the competition Revelry faces with Mifflin and the lack of well-known bands, we fear the worst about Revelry. We do not hope it fails. We are just cautiously skeptical, as we are with any new big-budget initiative. One hundred thousand dollars of university, donor and ticket-revenue money is a lot to gamble, especially when it feels like we are gambling on the underdog.
If student leaders wanted to plan this year-end event strategically, they should have made it the finale to the university’s All-Campus Party, which includes a week of events, food and activities to celebrate the year’s end. Given students are already aware of the All-Campus Party, Revelry planners could have focused more of their time and money solely toward attracting a well-known band and would have avoided the “Mifflin-alternative” controversy entirely. At the very least, Revelry’s leaders should have picked a different date.
As a concept, Revelry had a lot of promise, and maybe we will be pleasantly surprised with its outcome. Reading the nasty, mocking comments on Revelry’s Facebook page, we feel for those who worked so hard on it. But ultimately, they brought it upon themselves.
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