UNDERGROUND, ABOVE & BEYOND: HARM REDUCTION IN THE UNREGULATED DOOF SCENE
Over the recent years, it’s becoming more and more common for music festivals and raves to have a harm reduction service on site, such as DanceWize NSW. Many unregulated events (i.e. bush doofs, warehouse parties, underground raves) also provide some sort of care space and/ or roving service to help their punters stay safe.
Origins of Entropy, an ‘alternative music/arts/lifestyle event’ (i.e. a sick doof), is one such event. They ran their own peer-based harm reduction service in 2017 and 2018, and in 2019 invited DanceWize NSW along to provide this service with them. Users News sat down with Phill, one of the individuals behind Origins of Entropy, to discuss the role that festival organisers have in reducing harm at their events
UN: Hey Phill, thanks for having me. Firstly, tell me about yourself! What was your introduction to doofing and festivals, and how did that end up with you throwing Origins of Entropy over the last three years?
P: I went to my first doof about 15 years ago and was a big fan of the vibe and the people who attended these events. They are carefree spaces that encourage everyone to be themselves without judgement, which is a unique experience amongst our heavily structured society, and I was inspired to try and contribute what I could. My first contribution was me writing music to perform at them, and eventually I started contributing by helping friends run parties, before finally putting on my own events.
Regarding my own events, I travelled to Europe in my mid-twenties and went to some of the bigger alternative outdoor festivals – Noise Poison, Freqs of Nature, Lost Theory Festival, and many more. These events hosted mainly experimental electronic music, as well as having adult playgrounds in and around the dancefloors, and were vastly different to anything that was happening in Australia at the time. When I arrived home I was inspired, so I banded together with some good friends and we started hosting our own gatherings that were focused on doing what the rest of the Australian outdoor scene was not. From the start, there was the understanding that if we actually wanted to get anywhere and have longevity, we would have to start small and grow organically. The first few years was an annually operated event called Void, which eventually evolved into Origins Of Entropy.
UN: I remember what really struck me when I attended Origins of Entropy two years ago was that Origins had its own harm reduction and crowd care team, even though it was an unregulated event. What was your rationale behind providing a care service, and how did it work?
P: As I gained more experience over the years from managing events, I understood that promoters have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their patrons. By implementing a crowd care service, we were able to facilitate that additional level of care. The teams operated around the clock to look out for people in need of help. We also provided a space for the rovers to take anyone that needed some downtime or extra support. We made sure our crowd-carers had first aid training, and experience in similar roles — we actually even had some people from DanceWize NSW volunteering with our team. It’s not like we were just picking any random person to help — it was a carefully curated team of the most caring, capable and experienced individuals in our community.
Another harm reduction method we implemented this year was to have breaks in the music at key points during the event. This wasn’t a requirement for us to be able to operate the event, it was just another harm reduction practice. Quite often, if you give a lot of people the option to party for four days, they will party for those four days, non-stop. And I know this because I have done it myself in the past. If you take away the music and utilise the time to remind everyone that we are all here together and we should all be looking out for each other, then a fair percentage of the crowd will positively receive this message and take some time to recharge and reflect.
The more events I managed, the deeper my understanding became about the responsibility of promoters. I’ve seen small situations avalanche out of control, and it is the organiser’s duty of care to have in place preemptive measures to make sure things don’t go wrong, and to have the appropriate protocols in place in case they do. In saying that, it’s always a fine line between babysitting patrons versus giving them a level of responsibility — but that line isn’t always so clear. At the end of the day, creating an event that cares for the people and helps educate them to care for themselves and others is just as important as having super sweet entertainment.
UN: So how did you find working with DanceWize NSW at your last event? Were there significant differences between NUAA’s service compared to doing it in-house?
P: We’ve never had any major incidents at any of our events, so it’s hard to tell whether DanceWize NSW was more effective than the crowd care team we put together. The only major difference I found was that DanceWize NSW gave us a log of every single interaction or incident there was through the event. They gave a pretty good report at the end of it all, and that gave a lot more insight about what to look out for next time.
UN: So before, you were talking about the organisers having a responsibility to patrons, to keep the community safe. I wanted to ask about sexual violence and sexual harassment at events — from your experience, is there a problem with this sort of behaviour in the doof scene?
P: Honestly? I don’t think so, at least not around Sydney events. But that does not mean that there are zero incidents. There’s always going to be that one person who behaves inappropriately, not only in the doof scene but in every aspect of life, from workplace environments to social outings.
I think it’s common for people to get intoxicated and become less mindful of how they are acting, and that includes how they interact with other individuals. People that attend doofs aren’t anymore evolved than anyone else out there.
But I would say in 99% of the cases when unwanted advances are made on someone, making the individual aware of their actions is enough. Generally, said person apologises and everyone goes back to doing what they were doing before the situation arose.
However, it is way too common for low levels of harassment to be accepted as general behaviour, and that is just one of the reasons why these things keep perpetually happening. Because of this, it’s important that we educate the attendees of the events of what is and is not acceptable. It is hard to cancel out all the negative behaviour though, especially once events start getting larger. It’s a numbers game really — the more people you have, the more chances of having an arsehole among them.
One way myself and other organisers are dedicated to keeping people safe is by keeping an event blacklist. This list is shared only between promoters and is used to stop violent and predatory individuals from coming to our events — there are some people who aren’t welcome. To be honest though, I haven’t thought too much about how to deal with sexual harassment at events, asides from pre-event awareness campaigns and having security on site to deal with offenders. Stating it’s not on, offering safe spaces, making patrons aware that offenders will be removed and barred seems to have been enough for our events so far.
Is giving someone information about consent going to stop sexual violence though? I think that kind of education and information more works on people who are unconsciously harassing — people who are getting intoxicated and being intrusive. There’s always going to be a small minority of people in the world who are going to be acting consciously with bad intentions, and I don’t currently have a solution for how to deal with that situation when it does arise. But you have given me something to think about. It never hurts to try and be more innovative in crowd care.
UN: This year’s Origins of Entropy came to an early end on the Sunday, as does occasionally happen with underground parties. When it was clear that the party couldn’t go on, were you worried about people driving intoxicated?
P: That was something that we were worried about, and it was something we told police — “Look, there are 1800 people who came here expecting a party, and this is the peak of the event. If you take that away from them now, they aren’t going to chill out and go to bed, they’re either going to keep partying, or drive home before they are properly rested”.
If an event is being run in a way that minimises all possible harms, shutting it down is an irresponsible option compared to letting the energy naturally fade out. I know, as a fact, that a lot of people went back to their camps and kept partying. You take the music away, and people will entertain themselves by getting intoxicated.
I feel like the police have a conflict of interest when it comes to their affiliation with outdoor events. On one hand, they are there to keep everyone safe and their advice on how to increase the safety of an event is at times useful. On the other, they are there to do the job of the government and enforce government legislation, and it is not uncommon for legislation to be irrelevant, outdated or unnecessarily over-restrictive. If the police were more open to working with the community, rather than acting as if everything is black and white, then these relationships could be much more productive, but at the moment that isn’t the case.
People worked themselves up for an experience, and they got that experience one way or another. Thankfully, there weren’t any accidents from people driving home — maybe that says something positive about the personal responsibility of the people in our scene.
UN: I also wanted to talk about getting to and from events in more general terms. There is this shared concern between the authorities and our community in not wanting people to crash and die, right? How do we navigate this?
P: That seems obvious, who really wants anyone to crash and die? I definitely think event organisers have a good chunk of responsibility on this one. For multi-day events, promoters need to not only educate punters about not driving while fatigued and intoxicated, but also provide opportunities for punters to not drive home in that state. For example, you always allow people to stay an extra night, and make sure that the event’s entertainment is stopped before midnight on that last night at the very latest. If the entertainment keeps going, then people keep going, which defeats the purpose of allowing people to stay that extra night to recover. Also, having markets open throughout the festival, till the morning after the last day, so that people can get some food, have a coffee and a meal before they drive so they’re properly recuperated.
It is also good to provide a secondary option for patrons to get to the event with services such as shuttle buses, and also give individuals access to services such as Blow Me First. And if you catch people driving intoxicated, then those individuals should probably be going on a blacklist as well.
It is definitely the younger crowd that drives home when they’re not as well rested as they should be, but it’s hard to avoid. You can identify an intoxicated person, but a fatigued individual is a lot harder to spot — the younger generations will go through that learning curve though and hopefully we can speed up the process with education coming from the more experienced peers in the community .Again, promoters are responsible to try and provide solutions to these issues, but that doesn’t mean individuals shouldn’t be responsible for themselves.
UN: Do you have any last thoughts to add?
P: Unfortunately, we can’t solely rely on people to be responsible for themselves, and even when people are being responsible, things sometimes go wrong. I would heavily encourage organisers and promoters to think about their responsibility towards the patrons of an event.
The more events you do, the more you mature in this field and understand where your responsibilities should or shouldn’t lie. If it means reducing the cost of your entertainment to ensure you can take care of the patrons, then that’s something you have to do. But there still needs to be a line drawn where patrons are responsible for themselves. We can’t just cover everyone in metaphorical bubble wrap because we are scared someone will be a complete munt head and hurt themselves.