In festival production there is an unwritten rule: one artist per producer. Two, if the team is very good. Three at the same time, in five days, to an international standard, is normally not done.
At FIA 2026 we did it.
The real scale
Three artists. Five days. Three different stages with different technical setups. Three international riders with specific demands: sound, backline, catering, security, transport. Three tours arriving in the country with their own crews that must blend with the local team without friction. Three international management teams expecting the same quality of response they would get in Madrid, Mexico City or Bogotá.
And all of this at the same time, without any of the three feeling like the second course.
What the audience does not see
The show the audience sees is 20% of the work. The other 80% happens in the weeks before and in the 18 hours around each show: negotiating international riders months ahead and validating local technical capacity; coordinating arrivals, hotels and rest windows that honor the contracts; monitoring jet lag, food and the talent's well-being, yes, that is part of the job too; integrating foreign technical crews with local suppliers without clashes of ego or method; and plans B, C and D for every variable that can fail, because at a festival something always fails.
All of that, times three, compressed into five days.
The moments that define a production
There are moments at a festival that show whether a team is professional or not. They are not the moments on stage; they are the ones no one sees.
The backline that arrived late and has to be replaced in four hours. The vegetarian rider that slipped into catering as vegan. The sound engineer who wants to test the system an hour longer than scheduled while the next artist is already on the way. The RF signal that clashes with the other stage. The delayed flight that forces the rehearsal to be rebuilt.
Each of those moments solved without friction is a reminder of why experience matters. Not because it avoids problems, problems are inevitable, but because it solves them without the artist or the audience noticing.
What this case shows
For us, FIA 2026 is not just another event in the portfolio. It is operational proof of a capability few companies in the region can offer:
Managing international production at scale, simultaneously, to a big-country standard, from a small country.
That capability cannot be bought. It is built over years of relationships with technical suppliers, international riders negotiated again and again, crises solved in real time, and teams that have worked together long enough to read each other without words.
Costa Rica rarely gets the chance to show this capability at this scale. FIA 2026 was one of those chances.
The thesis behind the work
In every project we take on, from a corporate show to an international festival, the same idea applies: the quality of what is seen on stage is proportional to the invisibility of what happens behind it.
A well-produced festival is one where no one talks about the production.
That is what we did at FIA 2026. And it is what we keep doing every time we take on a project of this scale.
