Nuit Blanche is all about making art accessible, all night long – Montreal Gazette

Nuit Blanche is a concept tailor-made for Montreal.

Back in 1989, the Helsinki Festival kicked off something called Night of the Arts, a similar idea in which folks could check out museums, art galleries and bookstores in a single night. Nuit Blanche came to life in 2002 in Paris, and once again the focus was on contemporary art.

Nuit Blanche began here in 2003, and organizers gave it a unique Montreal twist. Like events in Helsinki, Paris and some 120 other cities around the world, our Nuit Blanche has a contemporary art component, but there is much more to the all-night event here. It features a wide array of cultural genres, notably music, virtual-reality installations and standup comedy. Because it’s Montreal, the bottom line is that it’s one big party — and better yet, almost everything is free.

“We really adapted La Nuit Blanche to the spirit of Montreal,” said Laurent Saulnier, vice-president of programming at L’Équipe Spectra, which organizes the event.

“The spirit of Montreal is all about partying, let’s admit it,” he said. “People here like to party, especially by the end of February, when it’s been a couple of months of days getting dark too early, Arctic cold, etc., etc. People want to go out. So we give people the perfect excuse to go out — a wide variety of activities in all sorts of different places, and the vast majority of them are free of charge. It’s pretty cool.”

This year’s Nuit Blanche takes control of the city centre Saturday night into Sunday morning. You can sample an astonishing amount of culture — everything from electronic-music DJs Tokimonsta and Whipped Cream at Place des Festivals to Canadian paintings from the 1980s at the Musée d’art contemporain, a virtual-reality adaptation of Franz Kafka’s terrifying novella The Metamorphosis at the Goethe-Institut, and drag queens performing out on the street in the Gay Village.

“La Nuit Blanche is for me a very big, very open menu from which you can choose whatever tempts you,” said Saulnier. “There are loads of people, for example, who use La Nuit Blanche to move their bodies, because there are places where you can skate and do other sports. For others, La Nuit Blanche is all about the joy of going to a museum at midnight and discovering the museum at an unusual time of day. For some, La Nuit Blanche is simply synonymous with the word ‘party.’ … It’s a menu where absolutely everything is possible.”

Roughly 300,000 people participate in Nuit Blanche each year. By way of comparison, a huge day at the Montreal International Jazz Festival attracts maybe 100,000 to 150,000.

“We think that it’s the day of the year when there’s the biggest number of people who go out, where there’s more people than on any other day who have decided to do something other than sitting at home watching Netflix,” said Saulnier.

Nuit Blanche is also spreading across the city more and more. The first edition happened only in Old Montreal and downtown. This year, the party is hopping downtown (including the underground world of the Art Souterrain festival) and in the Quartier Latin, the Gay Village, Hochelaga, Plateau-Mont-Royal, Mile End, Montreal North and Old Montreal.

Whatever the neighbourhood, the philosophy remains the same: it’s about making culture accessible to everyone.

“Whatever you like, I’m convinced that you’ll find at least one activity that will appeal to you,” said Saulnier. “But on Nuit Blanche, why not go do something you don’t normally do?”

That might mean going to the Canadian Centre for Architecture; checking out DJs and immersive installations at the Phi Centre; watching some of the best TV commercials from the past year as part of Les Lions de Cannes 2019, playing at Théâtre Outremont until 3 in the morning; sampling art videos in the Musée d’art contemporain exhibit Points of Light; or watching performances by drag queens Sasha Baga, Wendy Warhol and Ayzisse Baga on Ste-Catherine St. near the corner of Atateken St. in the heart of the Gay Village.

The 12th edition of the Art Souterrain festival kicks off the same night and fits in perfectly with Nuit Blanche, given that both are dedicated to making the arts more accessible. The festival showcases art in underground settings, including Complexe Guy-Favreau, the Palais des congrès, the World Trade Centre and Place Victoria.

“We always launch the night of Nuit Blanche,” said Art Souterrain founder and director general Frédéric Loury. “We kind of take advantage of this winter event that’s built around free events.”

One of the centrepieces of the festival this year is what they’re calling a Giant Escape Game — a kind of Journey to the Center of the Earth treasure hunt in which participants try to figure out puzzles as they travel through the underground city.

“People will be asked to answer questions about the works of art they see, and so it’s like a treasure hunt but built around contemporary art,” said Loury. “There are no prizes at the end. It’s all about the pleasure of participating, and it’s for people who maybe don’t go to art exhibitions that often, so they can appreciate works of art and maybe better understand the backstory around these works of art. They’ll be like investigators, trying to discover the truth behind the works of art.”

AT A GLANCE

Nuit Blanche takes place the evening of Saturday, Feb. 29 through the early hours of Sunday, March 1, presented as part of the Montréal en lumière festival. For more information, including programming details, see nuitblanchemtl.com or montrealenlumiere.com.

Art Souterrain opens Saturday, Feb. 29 and continues through Sunday, March 22. For more information, see artsouterrain.com.

bkelly@postmedia.com

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