Max HeyraudAVA Festival teams up with Smirnoff to debut their new 360-degree stage, ‘IMMERSE’ at All Together Now next weekend in collaboration with Visual Spectrum. Sarah McBriar, AVA’s founder and creative director, spoke with us about the festival’s origins, commitment to showcasing new talent, building a community around the festival, what their new stage holds and more.
This year, AVA Festival celebrated a decade of festivals, conferences, and club events. The team has stayed dedicated to nurturing new talent both domestically and globally through its exceptional booking practices and Emerging Talent Programs. AVA continues to push the boundaries at their flagship Belfast festival, as well as their frequent club events in Belfast and elsewhere, and they’re about to unveil an all-encompassing new project, IMMERSE, a conceptual visual-art-focused stage that encapsulates the spirit of AVA but away from home, as they return to All Together Now, but this time in the epicentre of the festival’s pulsating site.
AVA is one of the true success stories to emerge from the Irish dance music sphere, having grown from a 1,500-capacity day festival to a 10,000-per-day two-day spectacle despite global pandemics, the erasure of multiple dance spaces in their hometown of Belfast, a cost of living crisis, and a lack of government cooperation. AVA has triumphantly emerged from the other side of the seams.
The multifaceted brand has consistently pushed the frontiers of what is possible sonically, visually, and culturally, while also elevating a plethora of grassroots artists, demonstrating to the world what Ireland has to offer. One of the most admirable features of the AVA brand is that it’s never lost its magic. There is still a sense of romanticism in the air when you enter an AVA event, harnessing the unmistakable Belfast-kissed atmosphere they are now world-renowned for.
We spoke to Sarah McBriar ahead of their return to All Together Now next week as they present IMMERSE with Smirnoff.
Next week, you’ll unveil your new IMMERSE Stage in collaboration with Smirnoff – what can we expect from this project?
IMMERSE is a new 360-degree stage that is coming to the Top Of The Road To Nowhere at All Together Now, which is kind of the spine of the festival. IMMERSE has been a project we’ve been working on for a few years, and the idea came from work we were doing during the lockdown. We wanted to create something all-encompassing and fully immersive, transforming visual art into a full surround experience rather than something to just look forward to. It’ll be high energy, but also very beautiful and vibrant.
The talent roster we have locked in is incredible. We have a lot of amazing Irish artists from north and south, as well as some really exciting international acts. This year’s festival features performances by Irish acts Mano Le Tough, R.Kitt, Or:la, Síofra, Reger, Away From Dave, and Cormac, as well as pretty girl, STÜM, OK Williams, C.FRIM, Ben UFO, DJ AYA, and Sam Alfred, who just played an absolute blinder of a Boiler Room with us. We have a close relationship with many of these acts, and they have performed with us at our Belfast festival or shows in London, so we are very excited to bring them back.
Can you tell me about your relationship with All Together Now and the crew behind the stage?
We’ve been at All Together Now since the festival began. I think it is one of the best festivals in Ireland. I think their ethos, team, and the people who visit it are all super special. We started in a tent-like structure and later moved into AVA in the woods, which was extremely popular. And we outgrew the space. So now we’re taking over the main late-night area in the heart of ATN, which is very exciting. The opportunity to bring a project that also puts visual art at the forefront of the stage is exciting.
Working with Oisín from Visual Spectrum, who works on the AV and production side of things is amazing. He’s someone we’ve collaborated since the very beginning. I remember meeting him at a sandwich shop in Belfast City Centre and saying, “I’m starting a festival.” Are you on board? And he said, “Yes”, immediately. So it’s quite a cool development of everyone’s relationships from what we do and where we’re going.
The IMMERSE Stage lineup appears to be a melting pot of both new and old talent, breaking through with new names while also introducing some older acts to younger audiences. Is this booking policy crucial to an AVA lineup?
One of the reasons I started AVA was that I felt there was a serious lack of a creative platform for artists, including electronic acts, visual artists, and stage designers. I felt that what was available, particularly in Northern Ireland and Belfast, was more like sponsored headliner-led big concert shows, rather than an actual creative festival that spent a lot of time programming, working with artists, and developing artists, like actually thinking about how to place and where to put them, how to build them as acts, how to develop them, and what kind of relationship they have to the festival as well as to the city and scene. So, I didn’t think that existed before we started.
I think that since the festival’s inception, we’ve seen a significant development in not only what we can do as a festival and how we can collaborate with various people, but also in how artists approach us. We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations with artists who will DJ one year and then say, “Okay, I’d like to bring a live show.” Or maybe next year, we’d like you to do a live show. Yeah, so we have an open dialogue with them. And it’s very unique.
Going back in time, how did the first year of AVA look and sound?
The first AVA was ten years ago, which is pretty mad. It was in an old shipping warehouse known as T-13, where the Titanic was built. It was a skate park during the day and a venue at night. It wasn’t used much for the scale of what we were doing in it. We had one indoor main stage and one outdoor stage, which was our boiler room. It started with around 1,500 people. Now we’ve come full circle – it outgrew the old T-13, then moved to the old B&Q, then to Boucher Playing Fields, and now we’re back on the docks but just across the road. We’ve made the journey through Belfast and back and now we’re doing 10,000 people a day, spread across four stages.
The first year was magical. When you’ve been thinking about something, talking about it, and planning it, and then you stand on stage and see everything come to life while everyone has a good time. We knew something special had occurred. And we needed to expand on it.
How has the Irish dance music landscape evolved since that first year, and has the festival had any positive effects on the scene during that time?
There’s been so many different changes. There are a lot more females involved in the industry. It’s become far more diverse. Certainly, since I started. I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation, that’s just one thing I’ve noticed. There is a lot of talent coming from Ireland, both north and south. Before we started, I didn’t think artists had a platform to advance, and I believe that broadcasting AVA, developing the conference, and touring internationally have helped. We’ve been to Amsterdam, Mumbai, London, Glasgow, and Dublin, and we have plans to do other international shows as well, and we’ve always brought artists with us when touring. It’s been exciting to watch journeys take shape.
The perception that it’s doable as a career has changed, and I believe that certain acts such as BICEP, Mano Le Tough, Saoirse, and some talented artists coming out of Northern and Southern Ireland have demonstrated that, that have inspired and given a lot of younger generations and emerging artists the confidence to do it themselves.
AVA’s Boiler Room has hosted some iconic dance music moments, including Or:la and Denis Sulta’s debuts and Space Dimension Controller’s famous ‘Ayla’ moment. What moments over the years have helped define the spirit of AVA for you, whether in the Boiler Room or elsewhere?
The crowd and atmosphere are unmatched and we see it every year. This year when HorsegiirL played on our Pump House Stage as the sun set and as the boats came in, the crowd and the energy were insane. I was surrounded by all of the artists, and everyone was like, “This is a moment, there’s something really going on here.” and you can feel that in the air. Similarly, the year before, DJ Boring closed out our nomadic stage, and it felt like the atmosphere could have blown the roof off.
Another memorable moment for me was the first year back after COVID. We had rescheduled the festival twice and it was still so touch and go. So it was pretty incredible to open the doors and see everyone come in. And, again, the atmosphere was insane, it felt like you could nearly bite it. It was palpable.
That was a special year and a special moment. Every set from the moment the doors opened was incredible. Many of the acts that year came from the North and South of Ireland, with only a few internationals. It seemed like every act had its moment. I remember Carlton Doom playing and having an insane set and energy – I thought it was great to see that from local artists. Gemma Dunleavy made her debut that year, and the atmosphere in the tent was incredible.
AVA has become synonymous with booking rising international artists, often spotlighting them and bolstering their careers in Ireland and elsewhere – why do you believe it is important to book riskier acts?
It’s important for us to bring artists here for the first time and to identify artists who we believe will break. It’s something we’re proud of and want to continue doing. You have to take risks. If you do the same thing as everyone else or do something predictable, you are not pushing the boundaries, which is what we stand for.
AVA has established a community, which is something that not all festivals can do, particularly in a saturated market. How have you gained fans’ trust?
We can see from the start how people respond to the festival each year in terms of buying tickets, supporting it, and coming back to us. I think we’ve established a reputation for genuinely caring about what we do, how we program, who we work with, and so on. It’s important that people can see and trust what we do.
Can you tell us about how you programmed the IMMERSE Stage and your relationship with some of the acts?
We want to book exciting, fresh, and new acts, as well as artists who haven’t played much in Ireland. Whenever we booked lineups, we were given permission to take that risk and, of course, trusted. Saturday’s lineup is pretty massive. We’ve got JWY, Hannah, Síofra, pretty girl, Sam Alfred, and STÜM. There is a large Australian cohort, and AVA has a strong relationship with Australian artists. There are a lot of emerging Australian artists who are gaining popularity with our audience.
Away from Dave, into Mano Le Tough, and then into Cormac on Sunday from 5.30 to 11.30, will be incredible Sunday afternoon vibes, followed by C.Frim and OK Williams closing. DJ AYA is closing on Friday night, she actually played for us at AVA London, so she played just before DJ Daddy Trance, Marlon Hoffstadt and she was mega, she couldn’t have warmed up better for Marlon.
We also have R. Kitt, and I remember the first time I saw Robbie play, it was myself and Will [All Together Now] who had gone down to Other Voices and we were hopping around like all the different venues, and we went into this tiny little venue where Robbie was playing and I remember saying “Wow, this is pretty good.” “What is going on here?” He’s now played the Belfast festival several times and joined us for a lockdown stream. We also have Or:la, who is huge now, but she really cut her teeth with us about eight years ago, when the Boiler Room exploded. She’s playing right after Ben UFO. Also, if you haven’t heard of Reger, you should – we call him the Belfast Ben UFO.
IMMERSE is a new environment developed by AVA in collaboration with Smirnoff and Visual Spectrum Studio at All Together Now from August 1st to 4th. IMMERSE promises an innovative shared experience, thanks to a specially commissioned 360 audiovisual-arts experience. The immersive space will host an impressive lineup of top DJs and visual artists.
Smirnoff believes life’s better mixed and that the party is better when everyone is invited. This ethos perfectly aligns with the vision for IMMERSE, where the stage is for everyone this summer.
You can purchase final tickets to All Together Now here.
Photo Credits: bits., The Hype Factory
