RECAP: Longboard Dancing at About You Pangea 2019

This past week from the 24th – 25th of August I was fortunate enough to be at the 2019 edition of the About You Pangea Festival in the North of Germany with a bunch of longboarding friends from all around Europe.

This was my first festival experience. I never really took myself as a festival kinda guy. I’ve many friends who live for music festivals, and as I understand them it’s a couple-days long experience with a lot of loud music, lack of showering, and camping…none of which are really interests of mine haha. But what I dug about Pangea is that the focus is actually sport-based activities, there is live music events, but all of that takes a back seat to the sport activities.

The event takes place right on a huge lake, so you can really do everything from stand up paddle yoga, to longboard dancing, to BMX, to breakdance, it truly seems like the list of stuff to do here is endless. If you plan your days wisely, there’s a ton of great stuff you can learn and experience.

Seriously. Their tickets are already on sale for next year, go check out their site and look how massive their offerings are.

How longboarding fits into the equation at About You Pangea

As it turns out, Studio Longboard has been hosting longboard workshops at Pangea for quite some time. So with that gained momentum, the Pangea organizers actually reached out to some prominent figures in the European Longboard Dancing and Freestyle scene to organize, and promote the first ever longboard contest at Pangea.

The contest went really well, the event was event hosted by big names such as Paris Trucks and Bastl Boards, and winners of the contest were awarded some really awesome gear.

Pangea has had a history of contests in the various sport styles that are presented there, BMX, Windsurfing, Wakeboarding, Skateboarding, you name it, there will be some kind of contest, and in 2019 Longboarding was up!

The event went really well, nice chill vibes with contestants from all over the place. From a PR perspective, the location of the longboard contests and contest was pretty strategic. It was located right alongside one of the main veins of the festival, so there was a lot of foot traffic that allowed us to present our passion to new people.

From a longboarder’s perspective, the concrete we had to skate on was garbage, but after a while we all got pretty used to it!

Do we recommend Pangea as a whole?

If you’re sports and activities nut, then absolutely! As already mentioned, you’ll have a ton of stuff to do here overall. I find the ticket prices completely fair for the amount of things you can do here.

Specific info for longboard dancers

For those looking to get some good cruising in, cruising around the event on the boards isn’t too easy, most of the concrete is junk, and there’s cracks, sand, water, or any combination of those things all over the place. So don’t expect long chill cruises.

If you want to just jam around to practice on your own and have skate sessions, check ahead again with either Pangea or Studio Longboard to see what the planning looks like. As mentioned above, most of the concrete at the event is garbage for longboarding needs, and space is also a concern. We had a small spot setup for the workshops and the contest. If no contest or workshop was happening, you could skate around in here, but it could only handle about four to five skaters at once, as long as you coordinated taking turns with tricks and lines.

If you’re an intermediate / advanced rider looking to improve skills, reach out first directly to Studio Longboard and see what their offering is looking like for the year you’re planning to attend. Currently the workshops are geared to turn more people on to the sport, so that means you can learn how to skate from zero, or if you already can skate comfortably, you can learn the basics of dancing. I can imagine this may change in the future, as the sport continues to get more and more attention, but the workshops from this round wouldn’t have really helped anyone who could already do a cross step and/or a peter pan, they were really geared for beginners.

If you’re going for community, it’s really fantastic, because it is smaller scale (as of now), and because there is so much stuff to do at the festival you get to bond with other longboarders over all kinds of different activities and experiences. What’s also awesome is it is an excellent opportunity to turn new people on to the sport! Being that everyone at this festival is active in some sort of way, they’ll be way more likely to have their interest peaked!

A recap video to give you an idea of the vibes and the setting of the event

Summing up About You Pangea 2019 for the Longboard Dancing Scene

Unfortunately, I broke my foot at the festival when I landed a trick weird, so I didn’t get the full experience that I could’ve had. As long as the offerings for longboarding continue to happen and grow, I’ll definitely be going back. The vibes were just too cool, and I’m already planning in my mind to be there for the entire four days in 2020. Next time without breaking anything 😉