Roya Sachs, Elizabeth Edelman, and Mafalda Millies marry art, music, and technology at the annual festival in Bentonville, Arkansas.
During the last days of September, a spirited crowd of creatives and local festival-goers descended upon Bentonville, Arkansas to experience the inaugural year of Format, an art, music, and technology festival. The event is the brainchild of Triadic, a creative house and cultural engine founded by Roya Sachs, Elizabeth Edelman, and Mafalda Millies, who created the company in 2018 alongside their partners at C3 Presents, Charles Attal, and Charlie Walker.
When the trio first came together, Millies was working for C3 as its creative director under Attal and Walker, the masterminds behind such heralded festivals as Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. Attal and Millies began discussing their own dream: to create a new type of festival that combined music, technology, and art that would inspire all ages to create a platform for unique multidisciplinary experiences. Millies and Attal brought on Edelman, previously executive director at the Global Citizen Festival, to help them build out the concept further. During that time, Millies, Edelman and Sachs were launching Triadic, and Attal proposed a merger to create Format.
The annual event invites top-notch musical acts (cue: Phoenix, Nile Rogers, the War on Drugs, and Moses Sumney) and artists from around the world to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where they work in dialogue with each other amid a sprawling green landscape. The festival consists of a variety of carefully curated worlds in which music and art fuse at any moment; the Flaming Lips performed as Nick Cave’s Soundsuits danced across the stage, and guests enjoyed an experimental audiovisual set by Seth Troxler before heading over to experience the debut of PAT, Jacolby Satterwhite’s multilayered video and live performance piece produced by Performa.
Posted on October 21, 2022, by Gillian Sagansky, W Magazine.