THANK YOU FOR TALKING ABOUT RESPECT AND TRANSGRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR

We have won a prize. But it's really yours.

You may not have heard of it but last night the European festivals celebrated themselves with the annual European Festival Awards in the Dutch city of Groningen.

It is a big thing for us who arrange festivals around Europe, and we usually call the event the festival industry’s Oscar award ceremony. We were called on stage a couple of times, and we won for Best Line-up of the Year, but it's another award that really impressed us. We won the Health & Safety Innovation Award for Orange Together, an effort against offensive behaviour.

If you were at Roskilde Festival last year, you may have stayed in one of the camps that received visits from volunteers who brought a new card game.

The volunteers used the card game (which had the subtitle Exploring lols, lust, love & limits) to start a conversation about difficult and serious issues such as consent, grey zones and transgressive behaviour.

How do you say no when you first said yes? How do you suggest that you should have sex? What do you do when your tent buddy thinks that the two of you should have sex?

These are some of the situations and dilemmas that the players discussed in the camps.

These are some of the situations and dilemmas that the players discussed in the camps.
We called it Orange Together, and the card game was a way to talk more directly about the difficult stuff. When we talk about our limits, we bring attention to them. And the more we know about the limits of our own and others, the more we respect each other. Respect is the keyword!

Nothing suggests that you find that sexual violations are more prevalent at Roskilde Festival compared to other parties in the night life or at places of education.

But we know that the free space at the festival and the grey zones that occur in such a casual party environment have been used as excuses to violate the limits of others.

So, we created Orange Together to make a change. Not only at Roskilde Festival but also back home after the festival. Lack of respect and sexually offensive behaviour is a problem worldwide, something the #metoo movement has clearly underlined.

And with more than 100,000 (especially young) participants every year, Roskilde Festival has an obvious responsibility for stimulating permanent cultural change.

Now we have won a ‘festival Oscar’ for the effort, but it is you who deserve it. It was you who played and talked for hours. And the change must come from you, anyway.

You really accepted Orange Together. Often, you were unstoppable when the volunteers were heading over to the next camp. And when we asked you, eight out of 10 replied that they found it important that Roskilde Festival focused on transgressive behaviour.

Thank you for your huge commitment. And thanks to Amnesty International, The Askov Foundation, DareGender, the Danish Women's Society, Everyday Sexism Project Denmark and The Danish Family Planning Association and all their volunteers who helped start up the card games and the conversations.

We spent the summer on collecting a lot of knowledge about your opinions, and this week, three of our safety managers have passed on the Orange Together experience to 40 other European festival organisers.

The festivals may be competing for music headliners, but we don’t when it comes to knowledge about safety and mutual respect.

Of course, Orange Together returns in 2019. We still have a lot of talk about when it comes to sexual limits, grey zones and general respect in the community.