For most, the Roskilde Festival is a mammoth cathartic fest that offers the opportunity to watch one’s favourite music acts in the company of friends and fellow festival-goers.
Beyond the music, however, there is plenty more than dance and merry-making for the festival-goers. In keeping with this year’s festival’s theme of ‘Equality everywhere, for everyone’, Roskilde Festival has, in keeping with tradition, partnered up with countless organisations of all sizes to turn words into concrete actions.
One such partnership is that between Roskilde Festival and 3GAME, the latter of which denotes a collaboration between GAME Denmark – a Danish NGO that uses street sports as a catalyst to drive lasting social change – and 3, the Scandinavian mobile network company.
3GAME was extremely busy during the warm-up days at the Roskilde Festival, so we caught up with GAME’s head of communications, Ida Marie Brix, for a chat about the collaboration and its work in the area of this year’s theme, equality.
What’s the aim of the GAME and 3 partnership?
First and foremost, it is to give the guests at Roskilde Festival an awesome experience with fun activities and a good vibe. The partnership between GAME and 3 uses sport as a way to welcome everyone – it’s a space to bond with friends, meet new people and embrace diversity.
How does this year’s theme of economic equality at Roskilde resonate with the GAME and 3 concept and with the work that GAME does overall?
GAME works with Roskilde Festival to promote diversity and gender equality. On our part, GAME works to further girls’ participation in sports. It is clear that you can’t completely isolate one equality from the other – if you lack opportunities because of your gender or background, then your economic opportunities will also suffer. The partnership with 3 at Roskilde Festival furthers gender equality and diversity in several ways. First and foremost, our tournament prizes are the same for both genders, which is not necessarily the case in sports.
Additionally, this year we were very proud to have the first ever female football referee in the men’s elite division in Denmark, Frida Mia Klarlund. She is a strong role model for girls and an inspiration as far as the goal of pushing for female referees in the Danish Superliga – or even the World Cup!
GAME’s overall goal is to implement social change through youth-led street sports and culture. In Denmark, we work with young role models as volunteer street sports instructors in less advantaged neighbourhoods to give access to sports and community for the children and the youth of these areas. Some of these volunteers are also volunteering with us at Roskilde Festival.
How does the GAME 3 experience add to what one can see and do at Roskilde?
3GAME is all about sports: basketball, football, beach volleyball, dance, slackline, yoga and panna. It’s also about DJs and hosts – important elements of the street sport culture. The concept is to host both tournaments and pick-up games where you can play with whoever is on the court or pitch. Mix this with the possibility that our partner, 3, offers to recharge your phone and hang out, and what we had was an ideal spot to recharge at Roskilde Festival!
What has it been like to be at Roskilde 2018 – are there any learning points for next year?
It has been nothing less than fantastic! The beautiful weather has definitely contributed to this. Moreover, the partnership with 3 and Roskilde Festival gave rise to a good mix of activities, which the festival guests loved. We had more players and spectators than ever at our GAME activities this year. Moreover, with the new partnership with 3, we also focused on dance as a street sports discipline, with a dance-off that we felt was a major success in terms of getting more people to join our activities.
This year GAME (and lots of other activities) were moved from their traditional placement in Roskilde West to Roskilde East – what has this been like?
We were, of course, sceptical at first. Would people know how to find us? The connection to the Street City, typically held in Roskilde West, has been a tradition for us. Would the guests in East want to play with us? These questions were answered with a resounding yes! The new area is closer to the camps and to the FLOKKR area [a community centre for all festival-goers curious about the many ways of challenging how we think of our society]. I’m convinced that we got more people to join that didn’t plan on doing so when they arrived at the festival.
