Went to a wonderful festival a few weeks ago: it's called Oerol and it happens on the Netherlands island of Terschelling. It's an outdoor theatre festival - which is one of my favourite things anyway - but there's also lots of music (bands and DJs) outdoors, indoors, in tents. It's like the interesting bits of Glastonbury, etc., and some of the groups and installations will be familiar if you've seen other Dutch festivals or other big continental items - and if you haven't, you should!
The best thing about it is that it's literally all over this island - so that instead of going to the next square, or the next field, for something else, you jump on your bike (everyone has a bike) and scoot the next few kms or so. The 'inhabited' bit of the island is maybe 20 km by 5 (there are big chunks at either end which are strictly Nature Reserves, you can walk there but they're not going to do anything else) so the possible locations are many and multifarious: water's edge, dunes, forest, quarries, streets, urban...
There are also these massive beaches which are great for building sets or enormous pieces of environmental art (there's also a beach where they dance all day and most of the night but I didn't go there) - and i've never experienced the wild wide windswept washed-out beaches of the North Sea coast before, and now I understand what people have been telling me for years about how atmospheric they are.
Terschelling is a holiday island so they've got bike hire for 20,000, campsites aplenty, all sorts of other cheap accomodation, restaurants, bars... And for 10 days every year they've got what is truly one of the world's great festivals!
Most of the info is in Dutch but everyone's more than happy to translate anything. You can get some idea from their website at www.oerol.nl
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