Nuit Blanche: My Many White Nights
Jessie Rivest reviews Nuit Blanche in Kelowna on Saturday, October 3rd.
Ask Me About the Art Nuit Blanche has been a significant part of my life as an artist, volunteer, and spectator for more than a decade. My first Nuit Blanche was in 2009. I had just moved to Toronto. I signed up as a volunteer, blissfully unaware that volunteering meant being awake from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m. I was assigned to an installation about sound and memory, a participatory piece where visitors could clap or make sounds that would eventually be played back through dozens of suspended recording devices. You never knew when your sound would return, or what it would sound like when it did. It might be distorted, just like memory itself. We think we remember something exactly as it happened, but our memories shift and warp over time…
The public, naturally, wanted instant gratification. “Where's my sound?” “Why can't I hear it?” “Does this thing even work?” I spent much of the night explaining the metaphor, and even creating some of my own. I got to watch that familiar transformation from Huh? to Ohhh.
That became one of my favourite things about Nuit Blanche. All night long, waves of people would pass through: curious spectators, partiers, people who had clearly been drinking all night, and then, somewhere around 3 a.m., the real art lovers would emerge. They came looking for things to experience without the crowds. I felt energized by all of it. The projects, the people, the weirdness of being awake all night in a city full of art. I proudly wore my little volunteer button that said “Ask Me About The Art”, and kept it for years.
I volunteered again the following year, this time at a textile performance where my friend Jessica Bebeneck was knitting an extremely long poem, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. She sat in a cozy little space she had created for herself while people peered in, confused about what exactly they were looking at. Again, I got to explain: it's a poem with themes of disillusionment and fragmentation, she is weaving it together and feeling the rhythm of the words. The shapes you're seeing are the paragraphs. And again, Huh? became Ohhh.
The year after that, I finally got to participate as an audience member with my arts mgmt friends. It was my last night out before I took the leap to move out west on a pet-sitting adventure. We saw a bed covered in maggots, some cool music, an outdoor living room where you got to write your greatest fear on a piece of paper and leave it in a jar, and many other all night long performances that were a true test of endurance.
Kelowna Connections Fast forward to 2022, when I became a Nuit Blanche performer myself, although by then I was living in Kelowna, where the scale was smaller, and only ran from 6pm-10:30pm, but still, I was excited to finally improvise in my new city. I was invited to perform Looks Like Sounds with Andrew Stauffer on drums, Nicholas Denton Protsack on cello, Darren Williams on saxophone, and a group of dancers including Niel Cadger at the French Cultural Centre. We played off one another and built something together in real time. It was liberating to experience that kind of experimentation again.
After the show, a gentleman came up to me and asked if I wanted to sing in his studio. That person was Eliseo Santillan, who is still a friend and collaborator to this day.
I performed again in 2023, 2024, and 2025, in various iterations including books, architectural spaces, and dancers. Last year, my partner was one of the dancers in a piece called For the Trees led by Claudia Jane Moore. It was our first time performing/improvising together in public, which was such a special way to deepen our creative relationship. Each year we had positive feedback from the audience, and provocative, meaning-making conversations around the core of the piece.
This year I didn’t submit an application; I was keen to take in Nuit Blanche in Kelowna as a spectator.
Night Hopping
We started at the Kelowna Heritage Museum with a nighttime scavenger hunt, using flashlights to find different animals. It was cute, playful, and actually a great way to be introduced to a museum I had somehow never visited. I enjoyed seeing photographs of Kelowna from different eras, including mountain views I had never seen without a building in front of them. There was also a section featuring interviews with people experiencing homelessness, alongside questions about what we do about homelessness and ideas written by children and members of the public. It mattered to me that this present reality was featured alongside its history.
At the RCA, we saw Transfigured Night, a collection of paintings by Kimpov Eap. The work had beautiful colour, high contrast, and an abstract quality that I enjoyed. But I found myself wishing there was more happening in the space. The RCA is, after all, a centre for the arts. The downstairs exhibition space was empty. The outdoor space was empty. We had essentially come upstairs to see one small exhibition and then leave.
The “Silent” Disco? And Everything Else
The silent disco was another experience that left us scratching our heads. We saw the headphones, but many people weren't wearing them. Instead, they were partner dancing while someone shouted instructions. Was this a silent disco? A dance class? Both?
I asked a volunteer what was going on. Apparently, participants were first learning the steps before putting on the headphones. I asked whether people could simply choose a channel and dance freely, and he wasn't sure. I could see that people were participating and enjoying themselves, so clearly something was working. But the combination felt unnecessarily convoluted. One of the channels wasn’t working properly, but we still found a way to goof around for a bit on the dancefloor.
We also saw Everything Arrives at Once by Kay Barkved (The Queer Revue). There was a series of short performances and some beautiful costuming, but there was almost no information available about the work. We couldn't find a description on the website or on the sign at the event. We didn't know who the music was by, what the performer was exploring, or what we were being invited to consider. The performance itself was very short, so I was left wishing for a little more of a doorway into the work.
Then came Mirror Face, which was probably the crowd favourite of the night. Three enormous, ghostly puppets roved the waterfront. Their mirrored faces lit up, and they made small synchronized movements and sounds. The concept was immediately clear. The way to interact with it was clear. They could simply roam around and encounter people, which made the audience part of the work without requiring much explanation. It gave me a little Spirited Away or Studio Ghibli feeling, with the dark cloaks and glowing mirror faces.
There were a few things we didn't get to, including a talk and a musical performance. I would have liked to see the fortune-telling event, but it was quite a ways away from everything else.
Strange and Empty
We left with a strange sense of disappointment and emptiness.
Not because it was bad. It wasn't. There were genuinely lovely moments throughout the night. But I couldn't shake the feeling of how much potential was there.
Nuit Blanche has the potential to be an extraordinary event for Kelowna. It can create those little portals between artists and the public. It can make people curious about something they don't immediately understand. It can turn a quiet library into a place where someone is screaming operatically. It can make a museum feel playful. It can put a giant ghost in the middle of a crowd and make everyone stop and look.
More importantly, it can help build value for the arts across mediums. And I think that's what I was missing this year.
When I go to a major city, like London, New York, Montreal, etc., I can feel the arts landscape humming around me. Events aren't necessarily competing with one another. They're adding to one another. There are artists, audiences, venues, students, galleries, musicians, performers, nerds of all classes, and curious people all contributing to an ecosystem where showing up for art feels normal.
I've felt that in much smaller places too. Haliburton, Ontario, for example, is tiny, but it has an arts college, a sculpture walk, artists living and working there, and a sense that art is actually valued. People will pay for it. People will show up. There is a community of practice.
Kelowna has artists. It has musicians. It has galleries, venues, cultural organizations, festivals, and people making interesting work. But from where I stand on the fringes of several different communities, it still feels fragmented.
Maybe that's partly me. Maybe I'm always looking for the next thing to create and the next community to belong to. But I also wonder whether we're stuck in a strange stage of metamorphosis: it looks like a lot is happening, and yet somehow nothing is fully taking shape.
And I understand why. People have to work. People have families. People have other commitments. Artists are trying to survive. Volunteers are stretched thin. Organizations are trying to do more with less. It is difficult to commit fully to culture when everyone is already exhausted trying to make a living.
Fragmentation Has a Cost
Fragmentation kills momentum. It makes it harder for artists to find each other, harder for audiences to develop habits around showing up, and harder for people to stumble into something strange and wonderful simply because it's happening around the corner.
Nuit Blanche is one of the rare opportunities to interrupt that pattern. A small but mighty invitation that could give someone an experience of appreciating art that they may not have before, or could potentially have again in the future. For one night, the city can become a little stranger. A little more curious. A little more alive.
I know this because I've experienced it from almost every side: wearing the “Ask Me About The Art” button, explaining an installation at 4 a.m., making deep primal screams in a library, singing to my partner's movement in the cold, and finally wandering around as an audience member with no responsibility except to be open.
I still believe in what Nuit Blanche can do. But I can't help but wonder...what will happen next year?
Jessie Rivest is a sound artist, creative facilitator, and local arts supporter living in Kelowna.
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