Fête accompli

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This article was published 20/02/2021 (2052 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Festival du Voyageur’s celebration of Manitoba’s French, Métis and Indigenous culture and history has also been, in a way, Winnipeg’s winter secret.

The city isn’t usually buzzing with tourists during a February cold spell, but Winnipeggers have embraced the carnival’s mixture of family fun, music and an end to cabin fever.

Like everything else that has happened in the past year, though, the festival has had to change. The COVID-19 pandemic forced festival organizers to hold a virtual event, including eight evenings of livestreamed concerts and a series of videos that replace some of its popular events.

Little did they that know the world would tune in.

“One of the silver linings we’ve seen during the live launches on Facebook and YouTube, through the comments, is that some people are watching from very far away,” says Darrel Nadeau, the festival’s general director. “We’ve had people comment that they’re watching from Australia, people are watching from Europe, some are from the United States and of course people from different parts of Canada that have some connection to Festival or to Manitoba and are so grateful for the opportunity to tune in.”

They’ve been treated to a slice of Manitoba’s diverse culture. French and English were spoken, sometimes during the same song. There was ethereal electronic music from bilingual artist Rayannah and fancy footwork from the Ivan Flett Memorial Dancers, who blend hip hop with the Red River jig.

They also got to enjoy jazzier sounds from artists such as Andrina Turenne, a St. Boniface singer with Métis roots, and the Dr. Henry Band, an Afro-fusion group of four Winnipeggers originally from Nigeria.

And on Friday night they got to see Manitoba’s brightest star, Faouzia, whose performance came just two days after an appearance on NBC’s Today show, where along with John Legend, she sang their duet hit, Minefields.

The number of people who have tuned in has been a surprise, Nadeau says.

“It’s hard to predict how many people would have tuned in when we were planning this but we’ve seen about an average of 1,000 live viewers between Facebook and YouTube during the launch and we’ve seen several thousand views in the days afterwards,” he says.

Most of the shows will remain online after the festival ends for future viewing.

Music lovers have been bombarded with virtual concerts since the pandemic began last March, and the results have been hit and miss. Ones filmed by professional camera operators, sound personnel and directors have been the most effective and entertaining. Others filmed in people’s living rooms with a cellphone are less so.

The streams recorded for the Festival du Voyageur are among the better ones, especially those filmed at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain stage. They’ve created the familiar feel of a concert, and while it’s not the real thing, those moments have provided something to look forward to whenever shows with live audiences return.

These videos are the more prominent examples that have arisen from the Safe at Home Manitoba program, which the provincial government announced in December.

The $3-million program sought online activities that people could enjoy free at home during the cold winter months as an alternative to public gatherings, which have been a major factor in the spread of COVID-19 in Manitoba and around the world.

The province approved more than 150 projects, ranging from fitness shows aimed at children and the Manitoba Museum’s Dome@Home program that studies the stars and planets to sing-a-long sessions, journalling classes, genalogy webinars and livestream concerts.

“It’s going to give us a good library of content for us to rebroadcast,” Nadeau says. “If we want to do a throwback concert in summer, or if we want to do a specific shoutout to an artist or even a preview for future festivals, I think the online content we’ve created is going to be with us for a long time and going to be useful for all sorts of different reasons.”

Milder weekend weather should make for ideal conditions to check out more than 30 snow sculptures — a festival tradition — that have sprouted around the city. Many are located along Provencher Boulevard and at Fort Gibraltar, the usual home of the festival, but sculptors have also gone to the edges of the city to create their works.

A notable one is called Barbus, a giant face of a bearded man, which is located near the intersection of Lagimodière and Bishop Grandin boulevards. A video of how sculptors David MacNair, Gary Tessier and Jacques Boulet chipped away at the giant block of snow in -33 C from earlier this week shows some of the techniques and tools that go into making this seasonal art (wfp.to/barbus).

Meal and cocktail kits made specially for the festival (offered by Promenade Café and Wine and Patent 5 Distillery, respectively), have also been a hit. Nadeau says Promenade is sold out of some of its offerings and that Patent 5 had to order more of its icy cocktail glasses after its first batch sold out.

 

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall