Last week, the A.S. Programming Office released the lineup
of acts playing at this year’s Sun God Festival, which will feature more bands
to accommodate a longer, larger carnival-style event.
Alternative rock band Coheed and
will headline the festival on the main stage, where Sean Kingston will also
play as the concert’s featured urban act. Three acts, two on the main stage and
one on the north stage, remain unannounced due to contractual confidentiality.
Programming Festival Director Garrett Berg said the remaining acts will be
announced this week.
A handful of San Diego-based bands and DJs will play on the
north stage, headlined by local new-age blues band Lady Dottie and the
Diamonds. The midway stage currently features a trio of comedians, including
Angeles
working to add more to the north, midway and main stages, but called this
year’s program “much more diverse than any lineup before.”
“As with every year, we’ve had mixed reactions immediately following
the announcement,” Berg said. “But this year’s lineup is much longer and more
extensive. We had three stages and a half-day’s worth of programming to fill.
Everything this year will be new, so we had a lot of adjusting to do when it
came to booking the acts.”
The new Sun God Festival will divide UCSD’s north campus
into several zones of activity, including a street fair of vendors and student
organizations along
that programmers have dubbed “
Programmers also added other attractions to this year’s festival, including
pyrotechnics and LCD screens featuring student films and art.
The changes come after the programming office launched an
all-campus review of the festival, hoping to curb concerns over its
increasingly unsafe and unmanageable operations. The review culminated in the
Sun God Planning Report, which stated major concerns about the high number of
arrests and citations during last year’s festival. Programmers responded by
overhauling their safety measures, deciding this year to hire more expensive
officers from other universities instead of local undercover police used in
past festivals. A.S. President Marco Murillo and Berg requested funds from Vice
Chancellor of Student Affairs Penny Rue to mitigate security costs that had
nearly doubled this year, but their request was turned down. Rue said that the
festival had reached an operational “tipping point,” citing last year’s logical
event-planning flaps as reason to see the festival renovated.
“There are simple things that shouldn’t happen that did,
like putting your entrances and exits in the same areas,” Rue said in an
interview with the Guardian after the report’s October release. “The festival
needs to be about community just as much as it needs to be about safety and
good management.”
Berg said the programming office is tapping all of its
financial resources in an attempt to properly fund the larger festival.
