Director Director of the Colors of Ostrava festival Zlata Holušová at a press conference, May 18, 2023, Prague.
Prague – With a budget of around 200 million crowns, this year's Colors of Ostrava festival will be the most expensive in the event's 20 years of existence. At the same time, it will offer visitors the most extensive program to date. Almost 70 foreign bands and over 40 domestic performers will perform in the industrial area of Ostrava's Dolní Vítkovice from July 19 to 22. Journalists were informed about this at a press conference in Prague today by festival director Zlata Holušová.
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Artists from 30 countries will come to Ostrava this year. “In 20 years, Colors of Ostrava has developed into a respected event. We are not only a Central European festival, everywhere we go, we feel great prestige. From this comes a great responsibility to bring a quality program,” said ČTK Holušová.
According to the organizers, this year's Colors of Ostrava is the most expensive in the history of the festival, which was joined by Jakub Havrlant's Rockaway Capital investment group last year. This year's budget of the event is approximately 200 million crowns. “Bands' fees, human resources or energy, everything went up by tens of percent,” stated Holušová.
This year, for the first time, it will be possible to pay with regular payment cards, smartphones or watches at all places in the festival grounds. It will not be a closed system using a chip on the hand with recorded money, which is common at festivals.
The dramaturgy of the festival prepared a number of genres from world music, rock, pop, electronica, neoclassical, punk, jazz, hip hop to for example after soul. The main star of the festival will be the American band OneRepublic from the USA. Former One Direction member Niall Horan, Macklemore, Brazilian music legend Gilberto Gil on farewell tour, British duo Sleaford Mods and more will also perform.
For the first time in the Czech Republic, at Colors of Ostrava, the Nigerian singer Burna Boy, a global ambassador of African music, winner of a Grammy and many nominations, will perform with a nineteen-member lineup of musicians and dancers.
Among the Czech performers, for example, Ewa Farna will perform the biggest festival concert of this season with 18 musicians on stage, as well as Ben Cristovao with a unique stage set, the bands Monkey Business, Zrní and Vypsaná fixa or singers Lenka Dusilová and Vlasta Redl. As part of the theater program of the Colors of Ostrava festival, the Municipal Theaters of Prague will present David Bowie's musical Lazarus with Igor Orozovic in the lead role. Over 200 speakers from all over the world and many fields – from science, politics, culture, business and social life – will perform on 11 stages. The main stars include the leading British sleep expert and author of the bestseller Why We Sleep Matthew Walker or the provocative American-Israeli writer Tuvia Tenenbom.
