On P3’s little sunlit patch, Thursday’s biggest bitch was found with bingo cards, twerking and a collective decision that dignity was something you could pick up again on the way home. While the big stages used lights, smoke and millions of streams to wring reactions out of the crowd, the drag bingo did it with a few numbers, quick one-liners and people willing to look ridiculous together.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Most festivals have an area you only discover because you were really on your way to something else. A bar. A toilet. The friend who texted “we’re by the pink thing,” as if an entire festival wasn’t made of things that could be described that way.
At Syd for Solen, that kind of vague logistics leads, on Thursday afternoon, to P3’s small area. It sits in the sun, modest in size and without the machinery of fences, stage towers and security guards that normally tells us we are now supposed to be impressed. Here, the bingo cards are ready, and the task seems simple enough: Thursday’s biggest bitch must be found.
It doesn’t take long before the word “simple” has to be withdrawn.
Guests of all genders are called up and throw themselves into the competition with twerk, song and that particular facial expression you get when you both regret your decision and know you’ll be talking about it for the rest of the year. Around them, laughter grows. Not the polite laughter you offer a host while looking for the exit. The kind that folds your body in half and makes strangers glance at each other to check that they really did just experience the same thing.
Bingo is, after all, one of the most sober Danish cultural forms. Numbers are called out. Counters are placed on cardboard. Someone wins a basket containing coffee, chocolate and a salami with administrative charisma. It is a system designed for community halls, thermos flasks and people who know where their pen is.
Drag bingo keeps the skeleton of the rules and gives the rest a feather boa.
Between the numbers, singalongs break out. People shout, dance and join in long before anyone has a full line. What’s remarkable is not only that the show is funny. It’s how quickly the distance disappears between those performing and those watching. Within minutes, the audience is no longer a neat semicircle of festivalgoers, each with their own taste and social strategy. They are accomplices.
That is a state many concerts work very hard to create. Artists ask us to clap, jump, sit down, stand up again and hold our phone lights in the air until a concert can sometimes feel like a corporate event with bass. At P3’s drag bingo, nobody has to beg for participation. It spreads because the premise is clear: here, you’re allowed to look stupid. Everyone else does too.
And that may be Thursday’s most generous offer.
Valbyparken is full of visible tribes this day. Drag queens, Nørrebro types, families with children, pop fans and the guests who have dressed as if a street-style photographer might leap out of a bush at any moment. In the festival’s big areas, they move side by side. By the bingo cards, the differences become material for the same party.
The humour is cheeky, but not cruel. It takes aim at self-importance, gender roles and the well-behaved Danish reflex that usually makes a grown person answer “no thanks” when someone suggests twerking in front of strangers. No one is mocked for taking the party seriously. On the contrary, they’re rewarded for it.
That is the difference between camp and ordinary dressing up. Camp knows something is exaggerated, but doesn’t use that insight as an excuse to hold back. You can see the artificiality and still let yourself be swept along. In fact, that’s the whole point.
That is why P3’s small area becomes more than a break between concerts. It shows what festival community can be when it doesn’t have to be photographed from a drone or phrased in a press release. Community is not just lots of people on the same patch of grass. It happens when they dare to risk something in front of one another, even if the risk this time is only a terrible dance and a loving shout-out from a drag queen.
You could argue that six stars is a hefty score for a bingo game. That’s true. But a review’s job is not to measure the budget or count the number of trucks behind the stage. It is to judge how precisely an experience fulfils its own promise.
The drag bingo promises laughter, participation and a temporary release from the person you usually try to resemble. It delivers all of that before the rest of the grounds has even decided what it wants to drink.
Who actually ended up being crowned Thursday’s biggest bitch matters less. In practice, the title went to the whole area. On the festival’s smallest patch, the day’s biggest transformation succeeded: the audience stopped being only an audience.
Also read the Thursday portrait from Syd for Solen 2026.
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Fire stjerner
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