A colleague of Jonas Schmidt, creative director of event agency Q-dance, recently said: ‘I am now canceling more than organizing.’ That’s probably how it feels this week. Qlimax, which was to take place in Arnhem next Saturday, will definitely not take place. It would be the first party with real visitors that Q-dance organized since the start of the corona pandemic.
The cabinet banned all events without fixed seats for the next three weeks from Saturday evening from Saturday, in an effort to contain the rapid increase in corona infections. Organizer Q-dance was already feeling the mood and shortly before the press conference of Prime Minister Rutte and Minister De Jonge pulled the plug from the dance party, which many dozens of people have been working on for months. Schmidt: „We did not want to be naive. We knew what time it was.”
Still, until this Friday, work continued on the build-up of Qlimax, a party where the harder dance subgenre hardstyle is played. Because you never know, as an organization you still have to take into account the small chance that it can go ahead – although that scenario became more and more unlikely during the week.
“Purgatory,” Schmidt calls that uncertainty.
Eighty men busy in Gelredome
A day earlier, if NRC goes to Q-dance, he is still in the middle of it. It is just over a week before Saturday 20 November, when Qlimax is scheduled. The final sprint has started. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that it started leaking that major events might be banned – but it’s all still vague.
So at 6 o’clock that morning the workmen, eighty of them, start in the Gelredome in Arnhem.
From the Q-dance office in Amsterdam, Schmidt calls on facetime with Jari van Leerdam, who supervises the set-up. “How is it over there?”
Van Leerdam, wearing a fluorescent yellow vest and a construction helmet: „Good. I only see smiling faces. That sounds bizarre, but everyone is so happy to be back at work.”
Everything is on schedule, he says. “We are already working on the monorail.”
“Oh, nice,” Schmidt responds.
Van Leerdam: “We just keep working hard.”
Schmidt: “Blinkers on and go.”
Van Leerdam: “Yes. Fuck it, let’s go.” And it actually takes little effort, he says with a laugh: “For a large part of the crew, the show is always an annoying interruption of construction.”
Military operation
Organizing a party like Qlimax is “a military operation”, says general director of Q-dance Sander Bijlstra. There are so many links, so much needs to be set in motion. It is also expensive: the costs rose to two to three million this year.
Schmidt uses another metaphor: as a Qlimax organization you are ‘cooking’, he says. All ingredients must be right. The music, of course. But just as much the light, the lasers, the dancers, you name it. “It’s one big recipe.”
A few years ago, Schmidt decided that he wanted to hang gigantic light objects so that the ceiling seemed to be moving. He grabs YouTube to show that it worked. Qlimax 2014. A spectacle of light and fire, a screaming audience, and then the music breaks loose: ‘In my house!’
The two men – both co-founders of Q-dance in the late 1990s – revived for a moment. Schmidt taps his fingers along. Then Bijlstra collapses again: “Pfff, turn it off again.”
Qlimax 2021 had to be a big party for the enthusiast, often young people in their early twenties. For the first time since February 2020, an event with an audience again – although this year it was due to corona rules during the day, and with a maximum capacity of 75 percent. The edition was christened The Reawakening.
But Bijlstra and Schmidt no longer have much hope that the party will take place on 20 November, even though Qlimax has not yet been formally canceled by then.
Until then, Schmidt sees it as his job to keep up the courage in the office. “Up to a certain level you have to let people in the illusion.” When he was feeling bad for a while because of the corona vicissitudes of the company, he did not come to the office, he says. “I can take people along in optimism, but also in negativity. I do not want that.”
Bijlstra is now also looking ahead, with an excel file in front of him. “We thought we would still earn something, but now we are diving even harder into the minus.” It will take a long time before the events sector is back to normal, say Schmidt and Bijlstra. Things go wrong on many fronts. With materials for example. For example, lasers are being towed to the United States, where much more is currently possible.
But staffing is the biggest headache file. Q-dance had just hired some people again, says Bijlstra. “But can I keep it? Or should I fire them again? And what if we are allowed again next year? Then we will have shortages again.”
Here, he points out, you should see. A message on Facebook from someone who is involved in the construction. ‘Finally after 21 months a job in my own industry’, he writes. He sighs. “A boy like that will soon no longer be possible.”
Then Bijlstra leaves with his laptop under his arm for a crisis meeting with the head of marketing.
Moments later, show and art director Daan Jansen whirls in, a brie sandwich in his hand. He looks somewhat dazed. “Until five minutes ago I pretended nothing was wrong,” he tells Schmidt. For days, Jansen has been in one of the Q-dance studios “from 8 to 22”, where he designs the interplay of light, video, lasers, dancers and smoke and fire effects for Qlimax.
But he just spoke to the colleague who maintains the most contacts in The Hague. “He said: ‘Just draw a line through it.’ And now I don’t really know what to do anymore.”
“Hmm,” says Schmidt. “It could have been a little more subtle.”
Once back in the studio – with an empty Dopper next to him, an empty glass of coffee and two packs of snacks – Jansen still shows what he was doing. The floor is shaking. With a sigh: “Aw guys, it’s getting so greasy.”
Have a few drinks
What has been in the air all day will become final on Thursday evening: Qlimax is cancelled, the board decides.
What now? That is the question on the table this Friday. The team will first have a few drinks, according to the press release. But secretly, work is already underway on a new plan: a digital edition. “A plaster on the wound,” Schmidt said on the phone on Friday.
Q-dance has done that more often during the corona period. This summer, NRC watched as Defqon.1, the largest hardstyle festival in the world, was fully set up – stages, fireworks, lasers, DJs – for a live stream. Millions of people worldwide watched it.
But that won’t be in the Gelredome, much too big and too empty, without an audience, says Schmidt.
The same men who started construction in the GelreDome on Thursday, may tear it down again on Friday.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 13 November 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 13, 2021
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