There’s a version of event production that most of us have quietly accepted as the norm: book a venue, stack a lineup, open the doors, hope the energy takes care of itself. It works often enough. But it also means that when something genuinely considered comes along — when an event treats the entire experience as the creative work, not just the music — you feel the difference before the first act even starts.
Kiss Kiss was that difference.
Held at The Castle of Good Hope on Friday night for its Cape Town edition, Kiss Kiss is the creation of Ma’or Harris, Gert Schoonraad, and Merwe Marchand — the team behind BLONDIE and Texas — with music curation and artist coordination handled by Tourmaline Berg of Aloe Aloe and Quiet Life. Together, they delivered the most thoughtful event we’ve attended in a very long time. And we don’t say that lightly. We cover a lot of shows. We see a lot of lineups. What Kiss Kiss offered was something rarer: a world built around the music, not just a stage placed in front of it.
Start with the venue itself. The Castle of Good Hope is already a striking, historically loaded space. But Kiss Kiss didn’t just use it as a backdrop — they activated it. Ninjas dressed in all yellow paraded along the top of the castle walls. Astronauts on stilts moved through the crowd. A towering pyramid of real tomatoes stood as an art installation you didn’t expect but somehow couldn’t stop looking at. A RedBull station sat inside a hollowed-out concrete pool. Every corner had been considered, every detail deliberate.
The production quality matched the ambition. The sound was some of the best we’ve heard at a Cape Town event, and the VJ work throughout the night was extraordinary — visuals for performers weren’t generic backdrops but genuinely crafted pieces that elevated each set.
And then there was the ceremony. A wedding-like procession featuring multiple brides — some wearing dove heads adorned with real feathers — surrounded a giant wedding cake. When the cake opened, real doves were released, rising over the crowd and into the sky above the castle. It was theatrical, surreal, and oddly moving — the kind of moment that doesn’t just entertain but lodges itself in your memory as something you were lucky to witness.
But spectacle without substance is just set design. What made Kiss Kiss land was the lineup. It was genre-spanning and curated with the kind of range that reflects how people actually listen to music: Basement Jaxx headlining on DJ set duties, Mr. Cutts, Internet Girl, Ready D, DJ Diskotekah, Wata Mami, House of DTK, Coasters, LUUKHANYO and The Hii ROLLERS, and more. Live acts alongside DJs. Hip-hop next to house. Singer-songwriters sharing a bill with electronic producers. The programming didn’t try to please everyone by flattening everything into one sound — it trusted its audience to be curious, and rewarded them for it.
That trust matters, and it comes back to the curation philosophy. Tourmaline Berg has been a connector and architect in Cape Town and the South African live scene for years, and her hand in the music programming here was evident — the lineup read like someone who understands how a crowd moves through a night, not just who’s popular right now. Combined with Ma’or, Gert, and Merwe’s instinct for world-building, the result was an event where every layer — visual, sonic, spatial — felt like it belonged to the same creative vision.
We’ve written before about what happens when promoters take risks — when they programme across genre lines and believe a crowd can hold more than one thing at once. Kiss Kiss is proof that when you build an event with genuine creative ambition, people don’t just show up. They stay. They wander. They discover.
Cape Town has no shortage of events. What it needs are more events that care this much.
Kiss Kiss set a standard.
