Merci à la météo! It truly is cold comfort for Festival du Voyageur’s organizers as mercury drops, snow falls By: Alan Small Posted: 6:05 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024

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This article was published 15/02/2024 (881 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Breanne Lavallée-Heckert sighed in relief when a fresh dusting of snow fell on Winnipeg earlier this week.

The new executive director of Festival du Voyageur felt her excitement rise as the temperature dropped to a February-appropriate -13 C on Thursday, the eve of Winnipeg’s annual winter carnival.

She couldn’t wait to shout a hearty “Hého!”

“Very happy to see the colder weather, because the grounds here were all mud, and now they’re frozen mud,” Lavallée-Heckert said at a press conference Thursday to launch the 10-day celebration of francophone and Métis communities and their culture and languages, as well as Winnipeg’s fur-trading history.

“We’ve been looking at the weather since October. We were already getting nervous about the lack of snow we were seeing in the forecast for November, so we’ve been planning options A, B, C and D from the beginning,” she says. “When we got a little bit of snow at the beginning of January, I remember we were really excited about that, and then it all melted, so we’ve going been back and forth, pivoting, trying to make sure there’s art in the park.”

The unseasonably warm temperatures in January and early February have still left their mark on the 55th edition of the festival. The winter drought in Manitoba has made snow scarce for sculptors, and icy displays on Provencher Boulevard have partially melted.

Winnipeg’s weather has been dependable enough for the festival to scatter ice sculptures throughout the city, but there was only enough snow for works to be carved within Fort Gibraltar.

“That’s one of the limitations is we don’t get that same joie-de-vivre experience all throughout the city,” she says.

Lavallée-Heckert wasn’t the only one who welcomed a chill in the air that has been mostly missing in Winnipeg’s El Niño winter of 2023-24.

Andrina Turenne, who will be one of 200 artists, including recent Grammy Award winner K’Naan, performing at the festival, has seen all kinds of weather during her time at Fort Gibraltar, which goes back to her childhood.

“Part of what Festival celebrates is our resilience in the wintertime and our appreciation of the wintertime,” she says. “So to see our winter slip in the way that it is, it poses larger questions for me in terms of what the festival will look like moving forward if things continue the way they are.”

JD Edwards leads a seven-piece group at the Tente Forest Saturday at 10 p.m.; he welcomes weather that resembles a proper Winnipeg winter.

“I hope it won’t be too warm, and I hope it won’t be too cold,” he says. “There was one year it was so blistering cold… It’s been rainy in the past. We’ve gone through lots of different weather over the years but you’re always playing in a tent, so you’re covered, at least.”

Winnipeg indie-rock group Neighbour Andy, which formed in 2022 and released its debut album, Wild One, late in 2023, is keen to return to the festival (Feb. 24, Tente Rivière-Rouge, 8:30 p.m.), after making its inaugural appearance last February.

“Winnipeggers are great at making the most of whatever weather conditions are thrown at them,” says Joel d’Eschambault, who plays keyboards in Neighbour Andy, joined by vocalist Drake Lesperance, Mark Davidson on guitar, MacKenzie Jackson on bass and drummer Jordan Alexiuk.

“It will likely affect the snow sculptures, which is a big draw for Festival du Voyageur, but I know people will enjoy themselves and we’re ready to give them a good show, rain or shine.”

Turenne has made Louisiana a regular part of her tour schedule, taking her francophone-flavoured rock and folk to Cajun country. For this year’s Festival du Voyageur, two francophone artists from the Bayou State will make the journey north.

Besides her own show (Saturday, 8:30 p.m., Tente Rivière-Rouge), she will join Zachary Richard, (Monday, 7:30 p.m. CCFM), who has earned platinum records for his Cajun folk-rock, as well as an honorary Order of Canada for his music, poetry and his role in defending the French language and Acadian identity.

“Zachary Richard is a huge staple in festival history and definitely one of my early musical heroes. I’ve sung his music my whole life, so it’s very special,” Turenne says.

She will also join the Babineaux Sisters, Gracie and Julie (Feb. 22, 8:15 p.m., CCFM), a bilingual duo who come from Louisiana’s Acadiana region, near the city of Lafayette.

Temporary fencing has replaced Fort Gibraltar’s tall wooden walls after an elevated walkway collapsed during a May 31, 2023, school field trip, injuring 17 people.

The festival is putting the discarded wood to use. Visitors will be able to watch a blacksmith’s branding iron sear the festival’s logo into pieces of the old wall, and can take one home for a charitable donation.

“They will brand the piece right in front of you,” Lavallée-Heckert says. “Fort Gibraltar is an important site for the community, and even though we had to take the walls down, there can still be pieces of that people can take with them and memories of the fort can live on.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall