Saturday’s day-long outdoor event has a new name – the Rave the Planet Parade – but is organized by some of the same people who put together the first Love Parade on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The original love parade spirit hasn’t been around since 2003,” founder Matthias Roeingh, AKA Dr Motte, told electronic music magazine Resident Advisor. “It is now time to rekindle that spirit and make it sustainable for all.” The love parade under its old name was discontinued in 2010 when 21 people drowned and 652 others were injured in a crowd disaster in the western city of Duisburg, where the event had moved after the naming rights were sold to the owner of a chain. of gyms in 2005. The new non-profit parade will start at 14:00 and will run 7 kilometers through the German capital, from the Kurfürstendamm boulevard in the west to the Großer Stern roundabout in the Tiergarten, where a final rally will take place. Originally planned for 2021, but rescheduled due to the pandemic, the event was co-financed by small donations, with which donors could purchase mini raver figurines added to a model parade in central Berlin, and live-streaming “fundraver” DJ sets . Workers from the organization Rave the Planet created a miniature model of Berlin’s Strasse des 17 Juni and the Victory Column. Photo: Hayoung Jeon/EPA Organizers said the parade was billed as a demonstration with 25,000 participants – a far cry from the 1.5 million who marched in Berlin at the top of the Love Parade in 1999, but a bigger crowd than the 150 revelers at the inaugural event. Around 150 electronic artists will appear on floats representing Berlin, Sweden, Belgium, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine and the Netherlands among others. A UK float will be hosted by Save Our Scene, a campaign set up to keep Britain’s independent electronic music scene alive during the Covid-19 crisis. If Love Parade’s original motto, Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen (“Peace, Joy, Pancakes”) was cheerfully nihilistic, Rave the Planet Parade presents itself with a slightly more serious look. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Organizers told the Guardian that they remained in contact with the friends and families of the victims of the Duisburg crash and decided not to hold a memorial event after consulting with them. Instead, political demands will be blared in German and English from the loudspeakers every hour, some serious, some more spontaneous. They include calls for an end to the decade of Good Friday “dancing bans”, an unconditional basic income for artists and cultural workers and recognition of Berlin’s techno culture as intangible cultural heritage on the Unesco list. For Sunday, there are plans to recruit volunteers to retrace the steps of the ravers and pick up trash. Confetti, organizers warn, looks pretty but is non-biodegradable. The techno parade returns to Berlin about four months after the city’s nightclubs reopened in early March, following nearly two years of closures and strict hygiene rules. During the shutdown of clubland, many young Berliners discovered impromptu parties in the city’s public parks as an acceptable alternative and seem to have developed a taste for open-air clubbing: Berlin’s senate is debating a ban on alcohol in parks to limit the ongoing party.
