Rise up: Girls Don’t Sync are among the acts set to perform at the new one-day event
(Picture: Handout)It’s hard to remember the last time the announcement of a new festival made so much of a splash as Risen. The one-day dance music extravaganza, set to land in Hackney Wick in April, has totally eschewed the male-dominated norms of the industry with a line-up “centred around the divine feminine” — in other words, it will run with a programme made up exclusively of women, trans and non-binary artists. Men can attend, but not perform. Tickets flew when they went on sale earlier this year, which begs the question: is this the festival London has been crying out for?
With many of the UK’s biggest music events making a return last summer, early-pandemic fears that the scene could collapse were more or less assuaged. But it also proved that it is still struggling with a chronic issue: a near-universal inability to book gender-balanced line-ups.
