Overview
Chalk up another victim to the Omicron outbreak: one of Aotearoa's favourite New Year's festivals Rhythm and Vines has had its rescheduled Easter edition cancelled.
If that sentence is confusing, let's catch you up. Amid a slew of rescheduled and cancelled events during the Delta outbreak of COVID-19 late last year, Gisborne's famous New Year's festival Rhythm and Vines 21/22 was pushed until Easter weekend 2022.
But on Monday, March 7, organisers announced on Instagram that the rescheduled Easter weekend dates have also been canned, as the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19 sweeps through the community.
"R&V Easter is cancelled. Booooooooo," an Instagram post on the official festival account reads, with organisers adding they were instead setting their sights on this year's 20th Anniversary edition, set to take place on Dec 28 - Dec 31 2022.
The move doesn't come as much of a surprise: New Zealand currently sits at red in the country's COVID-19 traffic light protection framework, with the number of active cases currently sitting around 180,000.
If you had tickets to the R&V Easter, don't worry — your tickets will automatically rollover into R&V 2022. For those wanting their money back, a refund window is open from now until Monday, March 21, 2022.
Pre-sale tickets for this year's R&V will go on sale on March 16, with general public passes set to go on sale at 1pm, March 24.
Rhythm and Vines Easter has now been cancelled, with ticket holders able to use their passes for this year's New Year's festival, set to take place from December 28 - December 31, 2022. For more information, head to R&V's official website.