‘The Industry At Large Benefits From Independent Thought & Experimentation’ Says Co-Founder of Dance Festival Elements

The 2026 edition of Elements festival is getting underway today (Aug. 7) at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pennsylvania. Having started in 2013 as a one-day event in Brooklyn, Elements has over the years transformed into a sprawling three-day fest in the Pocono Mountains, with the event itself largely taking place in the woods behind the racetrack.

While Elements is and always has been an independent festival, it’s got a lineup to compete with any major dance gathering. This year’s bill includes Charlotte de Witte, Chris Lake, Subtronics, Porter Robinson, Of the Trees, Above & Beyond, Cloonee, Excision and Azzeca, with organizers expecting a crowd of up to 40,000, up from the 33,000 hosted in 2025. The event is produced by its co-founders Brett Herman and Timothy Monkiewicz along with a core team of 20 and many more during the festival itself.

With its whimsical vibes, Elements draws comparisons to other North American dance festivals Lightning in a Bottle, Electric Forest and Shambhala, and draws many of the same attendees as well. In their own ways, all four events take inspiration from Burning Man, an event Herman has attended 20 times — and, with the team, has consciously adopted pieces of. As such, the focus is on experiences, creativity and participation, with Elements hosting space for attendees to create their own immersive camps and installations and the general focus being as much on adventures in the woods as it is on music.

But how does an independent festival survive and grow in one of the most competitive regions of the United States, with the current Elements site only 100 miles east from New York City.

“It’s been a massive challenge,” says Herman says. “The pressures an independent festival faces are the same if not greater than any other business — dealing with inflation, rising fuel prices, increasing world instability. You have these rising fixed costs at one end, and at the other, people don’t have as much money; it’s as simple as that, so you have the candle burning at both ends.”

And yet simultaneously, Elements 2026 is the biggest and most fully realized edition of the event so far, with Herman proclaiming that this year is “going to be better in every way.” 2026 boasts new Fire and Earth stages, with Air and Water seeing significant upgrades. There’s also “a ton” more art and experiences throughout the venue.  

“Something that’s key to the Elements spirit is to dream of doing it a bit bigger, crazier and weirder every year,” says Herman.

Elements’ success – its ability to draw big names and a big audience – was not assured. The event persevered through the pandemic with In My Elements, a 250-person retreat at a then undisclosed location where would-be attendees had to take two-part covid test to gain entry. In 2021, the fest experienced significant logistical issues, like reported 16-hour entry lines, as areas of the site flooded following Hurricane Ida.This situation ultimately resulted in Elements moving from its site in Lakewood, PA to its current home in Long Pond, 70 miles to the south. Here, in 2024, Hurricane Debby swept through the region, causing major flooding at Elements and forcing the Friday lineup to be rescheduled.  “Weather in the Northeast can be a challenge, and so that was a major learning as we moved from the summer camp to the racetrack,” says Herman. “We know we need to create a site that’s as weatherproof and resistant as possible.”But through it all, Elements has not just endured but thrived. Here, Herman talks about growing the festival, why independent events feed the broader festival ecosystem and more.

Obviously a key to any successful festival, but especially an independent one, is smart financial decisions. Tell me about Elements’ approach.It’s an extremely tricky balance to provide a compelling experience that’s also a good value. I think we’re priced significantly less than a lot of other events, so I think we’re still offering a very good value, but it requires extreme diligence from the whole team at every step of the process. You can’t have a lot of fat in the budget. You need to make sure the quotes you’re getting are the most competitive and also ensure you have enough funds for the fun stuff. The experiences a lot of people’s festival is made on are things you spend money that are nice to have, but not must have.

The fun stuff! How do you create that whimsical environment without breaking the bank?We’ve reinvested in the experience continually over our entire existence — in the art and a lot of those intangibles. While those investments hurt in the short term, we’re seeing them pay off in the long term.For example, as you walk around the woods, there’s art everywhere, side quests, different performances. We have the fortune to be able to build things permanently, so we can create crazier structures and concepts and amortize them year over year. That’s been a huge help in being able to develop a long-term plan, versus having to reset completely year over year.

Elements happens not too far from New York, a massive market for dance music. Are radius clauses an issue?

They can be. We’ve developed relationships with a lot of the groups for which those conversations come up, and I’d say more often than not, we can find a compromise. I think there is some appeal to being independent. People definitely recognize the struggle. Even while fees — whether it be artist fees, vendor fees, staff payments — all go up, there is some level of understanding that people want to see independents succeed and stay alive. I think the industry at large benefits from independent thought and experimentation.

You guys get huge names. What’s drawing the highest caliber of artist to your event?

We’re offering a very unique experience versus a stadium or venue play. Again, it’s going back to a lot of the intangibles, the crazy stages and the non-stage aspects like the art and experiences in the woods and everything else not stage-related.

All that builds into a more community-driven event… And because there’s so much beyond the stages that makes somebody want to go to Elements, the entire package is completely different than an experience focused on a handful of names.

How do you plan to keep growing Elements?

One of the founding beliefs is that every event must outdo the last in some way. That’s really challenged us to make better experiences and blow people’s minds year over year. We have so many ideas that get left on the table every year. One of my favorite parts of the production process is brainstorming. We start by going to our different teams saying, “Let’s think of the best ideas for Elements this year and into the future without regard to money or physics.”

Then we whittle the ideas down, and obviously it’s a moving target given that sales come in throughout the year. There are so many things we save for the next year that there’s an infinite plan of upgrades. It’s hard to say where we’ll end up in terms of capacity, because the balance must be between it feeling right and being comfortable, but we don’t need to be the biggest thing in the world. That’s never been part of the goal. It’s to create one of the greatest festival experiences in the country, if not the world.