Winnipeg's Nuit Blanche back for 1-night-only engagement — as it's meant to be

Winnipeg's annual all-night free arts festival is back with more — and less.

Nuit Blanche 2022 will have more interactive installations and performances than it has ever presented, spread out in the Exchange District, downtown, The Forks and St. Boniface, with trolleys offering free rides between those zones throughout Saturday night.

But it's also moving back to a one-night-only event from a month-long one in 2020 and 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted organizers to scrub all live events two years ago, instead offering a few virtual shows for a full month.

The 2021 version returned to being live and outdoors but kept the month-long format in order to avoid large amounts of people gathering close together for a single night.

But a one-night event is what Nuit Blanche — an interplay of language, sound and light — is supposed to be. Though the direct translation is "white night," the name "Nuit Blanche" in French means "sleepless night."

Kurt Tittlemier, Nuit Blanche's project manager, says it feels good to be back "after two years of kind of a reduced event."

"We've really worked hard this year to put the installations all through downtown, but in good walking distance to each other. So we're hoping people can kind of park their car and take it all in," he told CBC Information Radio host Marcy Markusa.

The idea of Nuit Blanche started in Paris in the 1980s as a celebration of contemporary art. While some of it took place in museums, private and public galleries, and other cultural institutions — all free of charge — other parts of the city were incorporated as performance spaces.

In Winnipeg, exhibits and events take over patios, river paths, parking lots and alleys.

"It's something unexpected in that way, and it actually spread around the major centres in the world after it started in France," Tittlemier said.

Held annually on either the last Saturday of September or first Saturday of October to coincide with Culture Days, Winnipeg's Nuit Blanche debuted in 2010.

Among the array of exhibits this year are a dancing, glowing forest, a giant screen that interacts with people through shape and colour, bicycles suspended in the tree canopy, illuminated bacterial cellulose and a fortune-telling parlour.

A 1970s disco-inspired ​r​oller rink, an illuminated sculpture inspired by mystical floating souls of Japanese folktales, and a sculpture that turns heads into TV screens with distorted visages are also among this year's installations.

As well, there will also be a "pollination ceremony," described as a "theatrical spectacle in celebration of the bee" that is part parade, part fertility rite, part nature documentary opera. It features a six-metre queen bee sculpture/puppet as well as several smaller bees and a variety of flowers lit up in LEDs.

Choirs, dance and a projection-based light installation that focuses on mental health are also among the offerings for the event, which begins at 6 p.m. Most performances and exhibitions run until midnight.

New this year is a kid zone, running from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Children's Museum, with interactive workshops and performers.

"We're hoping that maybe some families, after the kids play for a while, they can walk on and take in some [of the other] installations that we have," said Tittlemier.

More information about this year's event is available on the event's website, and a map of venues, public spaces and installations is also available online.

Viral fashion

In addition to the exhibits organized by Nuit Blanche, there are other offerings from independent curators at locations around the city.

Those include an outdoor concert of experimental electronic music near Portage and Main, video and film projections onto buildings outside Graffiti Gallery, and a Wolseley art studio showcasing weaving, jewelry art making and natural dyeing.

Another of those peripheral shows is a Costume Museum of Canada exhibit called Viral Fashion … in the wake of pandemics, which compares the Spanish flu period and the COVID-19 era, and explores how fashion was influenced by the two pandemics.

"One of the first things that people will see when they come in is a nurse's uniform from the early 1900s," museum board president Andrea Brown told CBC's Up to Speed host Faith Fundal.

"It's to pay homage to the nurses, of course, and to the medical field."

Other items "quite colourful and joyful," said Brown.

"What people are going to see are some fantastic dresses from the Roaring '20s," including a hoop skirt that museum staff refer to as the "social distancing dress," because its width makes it difficult for people to get near, she said.

There's also a chiffon flu veil, which Brown says "looks good, but I don't think it has too much [effectiveness] for germs."

During the current pandemic, the greatest influence on fashion has been technology, said Brown. With people able to work from home, comfort prevails over style, she said.

"We're wearing a lot of sweats … and T-shirts and hoodies, and some people are are OK with that."