Rainbow Serpent Festival

Rainbow Serpent Festival
The Market Stage at Rainbow Serpent 2013
Genre	Electronic music, art and lifestyle
Dates	Australia Day long weekend
Location(s)	Victoria, Australia
Years active	1997– present
Website
Official site

The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a large electronic music, art and lifestyle festival, located in Victoria, Australia. The festival is mainly known for Psychedelic trance and Minimal Techno music, but also features other genres of electronic music and non-electronic music on the smaller stages. The festival also has many art installations, workshops and other attractions. Recent years have seen the festival expand from a solely music event to one that places an emphasis on sustainability, well-being, performance and art. The festival has attracted praise from revellers and criticism from authorities in equal measures, with its ongoing future questioned by police after one in 250 drivers leaving the festival site failed a drugs test in 2016.

The festival occurs on the Australia Day long weekend. The first festival was in 1997. The more recent festivals have been held on farmland in the vicinity of Beaufort, Victoria.

In 2008 the Rainbow Serpent Festival won the FasterLouder Festival Award for Value for Money.

The name Rainbow Serpent comes from the Aboriginal dreamtime creation myth of the Rainbow Serpent.

Rainbow Serpent Festival is known largely for its music, featuring styles from chillout, to tech house, psytrance, and many variants of these styles. Mostly electronic-based, Rainbow Serpent has seen DJ's, producers, and live bands. The music runs 24 hours per day usually for over four days.

Many people dress up in costumes throughout the course of the weekend, often featuring colourful numbers with lots of glitter and beads. Some of the days have unspoken (or spoken through events on Facebook) themes, in 2016 these included different colour parties and a Safari day.

Rainbow serpent collaborates and funds various visual and performance arts projects.

Market stalls, healing arts and multi-cultural foods are all parts of the festival experience and 'lifestyle'. A lifestyle village hosts a variety of activities to promote, encourage and inspire.

The Main Stage at Rainbow Serpent is not in any way supposed to be the 'best' stage. While it does boast the highest production values, it focuses on harder music such as Psytrance. Usually, the stage begins with an ambient act and progressively increases in energy throughout the night. The Main Stage runs for 20 hours, starting at 8:00 pm Saturday night, and finishes 4:00 pm Sunday afternoon.