Festival uses vacant lot as spaceship landing pad

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This article was published 04/06/2016 (3442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nestled between a pharmacy and a hairstyling school, a vacant plot of land on Portage Avenue is about to become the scene of a pop-up party.

Hosted by local music company Head in the Sand, the SpaceLand festival will take over an empty area between Edmonton and Kennedy streets and inject it with live music, comedy performances, video projections, food trucks and a beer garden for one day only. 

“We wanted to take some of our favourite parts of other festivals and put them in a smaller space,” says Head in the Sand’s Michael Falk, who is producing the event. “We have all these unused spaces downtown and all these surface parking lots and all these places that could be a little bit more animated or active, and the empty lots are the barriers to having a truly vibrant downtown, so I figured well, let’s animate them. Let’s just start getting a bunch of activity in these spaces.”

SpaceLand was inspired by other festivals, such as SXSW in Austin, Texas, which have a block-party-esque component, giving attendees the opportunity to literally stumble into semi-hidden pockets of entertainment. 

“You just round a corner and, ‘Oh! Here’s another stage with a bunch of bands and food trucks, and then here’s another stage with bands and food trucks,’” says Falk. “We wanted to take that idea and see if we can’t start building something like that here.”

The lineup for the day features Regina’s Juno and Polaris-nominated indie rockers Rah Rah, along with eight local acts including electro trio Vikings, synth-pop duo Ghost Twin, “folk-infused alt-rockers” Sc Mira and reunited mod-rock twosome Duotang, among others. Food trucks on site include Island Fusion and Best Meal (falafel and shawarma). 

This is the first iteration of SpaceLand, but Falk enthusiastically says the plan is to continue hosting the pop-up party at different locations throughout the city as long he is financially able to.

“The goal is to ideally turn this into a thing that becomes a regular fixture in downtown Winnipeg and can animate all different kinds of spaces… we can be mobile and land the spaceship in different places around town,” he says with a laugh.

“Ultimately it does boil down to supply and demand in centres and the nature of what we as a city value. Do we want a dense bustling centre, or do we want something that’s quiet and dead? Ultimately that’s on us as a city to spur on positive development, and this is a positive development.”

For more information about the festival, visit headinthesand.ca/spaceland.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel