We knew the majority was going to be regional-meaning from northwest Arkansas-but were also hoping to attract a mixed crowd from all over the country and beyond. Our lineup was definitely tailored to a slightly older demographic than your traditional festival, but was aimed at bringing together a real mix. We wanted to attract people with our overall curation-entice with headliners as much as the unknown. Mafalda: We really didn’t know what kind of an audience to expect.
What kind of demographic did you hope to attract to this festival? Watching students from the University of Arkansas sit through a Jacolby Satterwhite experimental live show (that is otherwise shown in museums), or a local sixty-year-old dancing to a salsa band that had never left Colombia before, was by far the most rewarding part. But in the end, that’s also where the magic lies. With Format, we had over a hundred different experiences and no control over the journey and engagement of the audience, which was our biggest challenge. Roya: When you’re curating an experience within a space or a gallery, you can control how the audience walks through the room and engages with the work. What was the most challenging part of curating Format? W spoke to the trio about the ins and outs of putting together a first-year event that will surely change the game for festivals to come. It is precisely this multidisciplinary cohesion that puts the festival in a category of its own. “In the early days, we were thinking about how we wanted to set Format apart from other music and art festivals-how we wanted technology to be represented, and how we didn’t want the art to just be decorative,” Millies tells me over the phone from Vienna. The festival consists of a variety of carefully curated worlds in which music and art fuse at any moment the Flaming Lips performed as Nick Cave’s Soundsuits danced across the stage, and guests enjoyed an experimental audiovisual set by Seth Troxler before heading over to experience the debut of PAT, Jacolby Satterwhite’s multilayered video and live performance piece produced by Performa. The annual event invites top-notch musical acts (cue: Phoenix, Nile Rogers, the War on Drugs, and Moses Sumney) and artists from around the world to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where they work in dialogue with each other amid a sprawling green landscape. During that time, Millies, Edelman and Sachs were launching Triadic, and Attal proposed a merger to create Format. Millies and Attal brought on Edelman, previously executive director at the Global Citizen Festival, to help them build out the concept further. Attal and Millies began discussing their own dream: to create a new type of festival that combined music, technology, and art that would inspire all ages to create a platform for unique multidisciplinary experiences. When the trio first came together, Millies was working for C3 as its creative director under Attal and Walker, the masterminds behind such heralded festivals as Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. The event is the brainchild of Triadic, a creative house and cultural engine founded by Roya Sachs, Elizabeth Edelman, and Mafalda Millies, who created the company in 2018 alongside their partners at C3 Presents, Charles Attal, and Charlie Walker. During the last days of September, a spirited crowd of creatives and local festival-goers descended upon Bentonville, Arkansas to experience the inaugural year of Format, an art, music, and technology festival.
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