Written by Mary Agan & Rebecca Hollman
Photos from Rukes.com
Two days full of incredible music, a random storm, art exhibits and some of the most delicious festival lemonade I have ever tried (sorry to the loyal Electric Forest lemonade-ers). That’s essentially my Ubbi Dubbi experience in a nutshell!
Going into a first year festival weekend, you really don’t know much to expect. I’ve heard rumors of how much fun a Disco Donnie event was and this past weekend I was finally able to see for myself how truly spectacular it was. Not to mention, the entirety of the Texas EDM community is PLUR AF. I was truly blown away at how incredible my time was in Fort Worth, Texas.
Ubbi Dubbi took place at Panther Island Pavilion, a secluded venue right off the Clear Fork Trinity River and right outside downtown Fort Worth. With the Fort Worth skyline in the background of the main stage, it painted a perfect production picture for all of the attendants. This is me complimenting the setup before I even dive into how gorgeous the main stage was. With about 30 vertical LED strips encompassing the stage and designed as a semi circle opening up to the crowd, it was one of the more unique stage designs I’ve seen. I honestly couldn’t stop talking about it the entire weekend. Illenium’s set really highlighted this stage design with his nature visuals. The visuals highlighted beautiful landscapes, water, and scenes from nature around the world. As these visuals moved across the strips of LED it seemed like the waves were crashing across the stage.
The Zoom Room, or the middle stage, was where all the house took place all weekend. This little tent was my favorite stage of the whole festival. It was small and intimate and also in a semi circle around the stage so you could enjoy the music from close to 360 degrees. This allowed for the crowd to spread out and so it allowed everyone to get closer to the music. The stage also had metal plates that allowed people to dance on flat surfaces.
The last stage was the bass stage and was on the other end of the festival. The grounds were laid out in a long skinny strip so all the three stages were in one long line. The main stage and the third stage were similar in structure and design, just on opposite ends of the festival. The bass stage had strips of LED boards and was located on a big, flat field that stretched back into the food truck area.
Disco Donnie Presents also showed how resourceful they are when it comes to the unexpected: lighting, thunder, hail and flooding rains. Despite the beautiful sunny day we had on Saturday, we were met with an extremely intense storm. About 30 minutes before the festival ended really strong winds started whipping through the festival and the temperature dropped significantly. That’s when the giant, downpour of rain came in. Management told everyone that the music was going to stop and that everyone needed to evacuate the festival. Because of this, every single person in the festival left at the same time and had to leave over one small pedestrian bridge. This made a massive swarm of people that were stuck on the bridge in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. After getting off the bridge, people either had to wait in lines to get their cars out of the parking lot or had to wait a long time to call an Uber since there was little to no service and also not enough Ubers for all the people leaving.
The rain was unfortunate, scary and unstoppable, but the party prevailed for a lovely Sunday the next day. From sources, the Disco Donnie team did not sleep the entirety of Saturday once the storm stopped, prepping and saving the grounds of Panther Island so all the Ubbi Dubbi attendants would not be stuck in mud pits and have a safe Sunday of dancing to sets like Tchami, Chris Lake, PEEKABOO, Slander and What So Not (who I also heard played through a concussion?!) The Ubbi Dubbi team did a great job of preparing the grounds for the next day since there was maybe only one mud puddle the entire day of Sunday. The weather fully cooperated on Sunday and I think my shins are still sore from shuffling all day long.