Come with the Gazette’s arts and culture editor to DalFest

Dalhousie University students flocked to the quad for this year’s annual DalFest, which featured performances by The Beaches and Neon Dreams. 

As the sun fell below the Henry Hicks Building on Sept. 11, students began lining up in the quad, eager to end the first week of class with a celebration. DalFest is the grand finale after a week of programming to welcome students back to campus. The annual event is organized by the Dalhousie Student Union. 

According to DSU president Anjali Seshadri, approximately 3,600 students attended this year’s festival. 

“It’s grown quite a bit,” says Seshadri. “Over the last few years — COVID really put a hitch here — DalFest and orientation-week events died down. But this is the biggest turnout that we’ve seen at DalFest over the past years, which is amazing to see.”

Seshadri says the event takes months of planning in advance to execute. From selecting the headliners to organizing security and arranging the extra activities, the event is such an undertaking that the DSU recently established a new staff role solely for the purpose of managing events like this. 

For the event, the quad was converted into festival grounds. Before headliners took the stage, students formed lines in front of photo booths, information tents and various food trucks that lined the adjacent parking lot near the football field. 

The evening air was brisk from the incoming fall season, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the crowd. Students showed up in their summer best, perhaps expecting to work up a sweat in the pit.

About 15 minutes after the gates opened, DJ Karate Kactus entered the stage to warm up the crowd with a two-hour, mid-2000s-inspired set. About an hour in, performers Amanda Drama and Taylor Zupiter from Interstellar Circus Arts took to the stage with an aerial hoop connected to a pole. For the rest of Karate Kactus’s set, Drama and Zupiter twisted themselves around the LED-illuminated hoop in gravity-defying positions. 

Shortly after 8 p.m., the DSU executive team took over from Karate Kactus to give the audience a quick PSA regarding safety protocol, and soon after, Neon Dreams’ set began. 

For an hour, the local alt-pop duo performed a mix of originals and covers in what lead singer Frank Kadillac called “The best show they’ve ever done in Halifax.” 

Dressed in a bedazzled, cream-coloured jean jacket, Kadillac commanded the stage with a never-ending energy. Midway through the duo’s set, Kadillac came down from the stage to perform face-to-face with attendees in the front row. Before wrapping up, he gravitated to the centre of the crowd to perform their downtempo ballad “Times Square.” 

After a brief break, the Beaches entered the stage shortly after 9 p.m. The quartet were dressed in Lake Ontario T-shirts, a reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent move to rename the lake to Lake America. 

Halfway through their set, the Beaches invited three lesbians from the crowd onto the stage for a Lesbian of the Year contest. After asking the contestants’ names, star signs and why they should be crowned “lesbian of the year,” the audience clapped to vote for the winner. The chosen winner was awarded the title and the shirt off Leandra Earl’s back, which read: Lesbian of the Lake Ontario.

Elizabeth Quinn, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student at Dalhousie University, remembers attending DalFest in her first year and, in comparison, this year’s event was “much better.” 

Outside of the Killam Memorial Library in the moments after the Beaches performed an encore of two songs and then exited the stage, Quinn tells me that unlike the DalFest she attended four years ago, “this year it was way better.” she says “It felt like a proper concert.”