Dance Valley Festival 2006 - Spaarnwoude Recreation Area, The Netherlands

14.07.06 - 15.07.06

Dance Valley Festival 2006, Europe's largest dance music festival returned for its 12th installment, welcoming 60,000 party revellers through the gates and lasting for 2 days. With massive headliners such as the Prodigy, Carl Cox, Armin Vin Buren, Judge Jules and many, many more.

In 2005 Dance Valley offically became a 2 day festival offering the chance to camp for 2 days to a limited 15,000 festival goers. This proved to be such a sucess that they've built on the same model for 2006. The camping facilities featured a 24 bar, shop, showers, the best toilets I've ever seen at a festival and an array of food and drinks outlets. A drinking water point seemed to be lacking.

Security was very strict, Police seemed to be everywhere and we were searched constantly when moving between the festival and camping area. Also the main entrance used x-ray scanners such as you would see in airports. The upside is you felt very safe, downside is that it got a bit annoying being searched so much.

Friday was a scaled down version of the main event. The larger arenas and the main stage were closed off and all finished at around 10pm pushing all the festival goers towards The Prodigy stage who delivered an awesome show as we've come to expect from such a well respected band.

The festival also featured the LG Action Sports World Tour featuring the some of the world's best roller bladers, skateboarders and motocross riders performing mind-boggling, insane stunts. This offered a good change of scenery from the the sometimes relentless dance music.

On Saturday the more popular arenas seemed to be the Global Carl Cox stage, the Hard Stuff arena featuring Lab 4, Mark EG (with his usual antics) and EuroGrooves arena.

The closing set on the main stage has always been the centrepiece of the festival. Thousands of festival goers descend into the valley to watch the final 2 hours as darkness falls. Armin Vin Buuren had the final 1 1/2 hours which climaxed in a breath-taking light and laser show featuring multicoloured lasers - without doubt the best I've seen in any club or festival by a mile.

Both food and drink was expensive as you'd expect at a festival - typically 4 euros for food and 2-4 euros for bottle of water/beer. Also, they insist on making you buy tokens for everything which in my opinion just makes things more awkward despite the obvious benefits to the promoters.

Although the festival was great and certainly gets a UKCD thumbs up there are 2 main areas that need to be improved. Firstly, whilst the camping facilities were excellent the lack of information regarding what could and couldn't be taken into the campsite meant that many people had items prevented from being taken into the campsite. Also, the majority of people we spoke to were prevented from returning to their cars to collect any camping items. Secondly the area around the main stage seemed very cramped compared to previous years. The hill in front of the main stage was closed off and the VIP area moved forward. Perhaps this was a compromise to provide a spacious camping area?

All that aside its definetly in UKCD's events to visit before you die list!! Well done UDC you've pulled it off again!

You can see photos from the festival in the UKCD Photo Gallery.

Review by UKCD