Paradice Festival is trading its downtown Las Vegas roots for a poolside stage this year, relocating to the Sandbar at Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa in Summerlin on Saturday. The one-day soul, funk, house and R&B celebration will feature Kaytranada, DRAMA, Collect 200, DMTRI and Hooper, with gates opening at 5 p.m. and tickets starting at $96.
From Downtown Grit to Poolside Glow
The festival's first edition unfolded on September 27, 2025, as a one-day event at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center featuring soul acts like Thee Sacred Souls and Ravyn Lenae, according to a release distributed via PR Newswire. This year's move puts the festival at the Sandbar, an outdoor venue with a capacity of roughly 4,500 people situated about 12 miles west of the Strip near Red Rock Canyon, according to Vegas 411. The resort routinely hosts outdoor concert series and pool events during the warmer months, per that same report.
Headliner Kaytranada, born Louis Kevin Celestin, brings serious pedigree to the lineup. The Haitian-Canadian producer and DJ won two Grammy Awards in 2021 — Best Dance/Electronic Album for his 2019 LP Bubba and Best Dance Recording for “10%” featuring Kali Uchis — according to GRAMMY.com.
DRAMA Brings Platonic Romance, But Not a Script
Chicago duo DRAMA, made up of producer Na'el Shehade and vocalist Via Rosa, will perform a DJ set at Paradice rather than a traditional live show, as detailed in an interview with Las Vegas Weekly. Their sets, often branded as DRAMA Club, let the pair step outside their own catalog and spin house, R&B and other club tracks tailored to whatever crowd is in front of them. Rosa described the format's unpredictability directly, saying the duo's DJ sets are too spontaneous to predict — a sentiment producer Shehade echoed by noting that music cannot be forced. The DJ format allows DRAMA's set to respond to the festival crowd in real time rather than follow a fixed setlist.
The duo's most recent full-length, Platonic Romance, arrived in 2026 through distributor AWAL, following their 2020 debut album Dance Without Me on Ghostly International, according to AllMusic. Rosa wrote the album's lyrics herself, and the record spans love between friends, romantic love and breakup love, weaving together the different shades implied by its title. Per the Las Vegas Weekly interview, DRAMA settled on the name Platonic Romance during a 2019 tour with SG Lewis, which the duo has described as the first tour where the crew strongly supported one another.
A Producer's Studio Roots and a Singer's Unconventional Path
Before forming DRAMA in 2014, Shehade engineered on Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music compilation Cruel Summer and contributed production work to Chance the Rapper's 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, according to AllMusic. He learned production as a teenager immersed in Chicago's house music scene. Rosa's path looked entirely different: she was homeschooled while touring with her parents' reggae band across Texas and California before relocating to Chicago in 2010 to join the hip-hop collective THEMpeople, per the same AllMusic account. Her early musical diet leaned on oldies, reggae, Sade and Brazilian music rather than typical American pop radio.
That eclectic background shows up in DRAMA's catalog in unexpected ways. Rosa wrote an English poem for the track “Yalla Habibi” and used an Arabic translation from a friend's father to help shape the song, with the duo spending about a week or longer refining her Arabic pronunciation before she sang the line in the language. She has also released a version of the track “Noche” in Spanish. Shehade, meanwhile, told Las Vegas Weekly that his collaboration with Sultan & Shepard felt natural, and he is currently working on a song that was ultimately omitted from the album, having already completed 10 edits and six mixes of the track.
What's Next for DRAMA
DRAMA has a new EP on the way and plans to release Christmas tracks, though the duo has been clear it won't release music at the pace demanded by the internet. The band prioritizes intricate sounds and lyrics over rushing new material out the door, a philosophy that fits the deliberate, homemade quality found throughout their catalog.
September has become one of the busiest live-music stretches of the year in Las Vegas, with major arena tours and Strip residencies at Sphere and Allegiant Stadium pulling in visitors, according to OnesToWatch. Mid-scale events like Paradice offer a more intimate, niche alternative to those mega-productions, giving dance and R&B fans a dedicated space away from the Strip's biggest stages. With DRAMA's after-hours DJ energy, Kaytranada's Grammy-winning catalog and a poolside backdrop in Summerlin, Paradice's second edition is betting that smaller and closer to the water beats bigger and downtown.
