Putting winter on pause Festival encourages audiences to explore the West End By: Erin Lebar  Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020

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This article was published 20/01/2020 (1803 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It can be tough to churn up the motivation to get out of the house in January. It’s cold, it’s dark and the post-holiday blues and fatigue make binge-watching a series on Netflix preferable to almost any other activity.

But for a while — eight years to be exact — the Big Fun Festival provided a real reason (for music lovers, anyway) to get out and about in January, bringing in an eclectic collection of musicians to an eclectic collection of venues each year.

In June 2019, festival organizers stated Big Fun would be going on hiatus, leaving a gap in winter musical programming during the weeks post-holiday concerts and prior to the Winnipeg New Music Festival, which paved the way for Winterruption to land in Winnipeg.

Winterruption, a music festival, has been running in Regina and Saskatoon since 2015, and along the way has added Edmonton, Swift Current, Sask., and, now, Winnipeg to its roster of participating cities.

Winnipeg’s Winterruption will take place at venues throughout the West End, including the Good Will Social Club, X-Cues Billiards, the Handsome Daughter and the West End Cultural Centre, starting tonight and winding up Saturday.

“We wanted to make it a neighbourhood thing, which is not the same as what Big Fun was; Big Fun was a bit more downtown. We want to bring people to walk around the West End, there’s a big intent behind that, we want people to walk around the neighbourhood,” says Jorge Requena Ramos, the West End Cultural Centre’s booking manager.

“We want to make sure that we’re creating an environment where people can go to a show at the Good Will and then go to a show at X-Cues, or come to a show here (at the WECC) and then go to the Handsome Daughter, we wanted it to be a more circulating, ambulant festival.”

Though the festival is a chain of sorts, being under the Winterruption umbrella doesn’t really affect how Winnipeg organizers from the West End Cultural Centre, the Good Will Social Club and Real Love Winnipeg have planned and programmed the event. It does, however, allow artists to create a mini-tour by hitting up multiple Winterruptions in multiple cities, which makes touring the Prairies in dead of winter more enticing.

For the inaugural festival, nine shows take place over the four-day event and include headliners such as Manitobans Leonard Sumner (Wednesday, 8 p.m., WECC) and Lana Winterhalt (Thursday, 8 p.m., X-Cues), as well as 2 Heads hitmaker Coleman Hell (Thursday, 8 p.m., WECC) and avant-garde pop artist Hannah Epperson (Thursday, 9 p.m., Good Will), among others.

“We’re trying not to focus on genre to brand the festival in that way. We wanted it to be a mix of things, like Coleman Hell is a Top 40 artist, which is rare for the WECC and we want to introduce ourselves to those people,” says Requena Ramos.

There are no festival passes for Winterruption this year, except for three “golden tickets” organizers gave away in a contest on Instagram, so attendees must purchase tickets, which range in price from $10 to $30, for each show individually. As an added incentive to check out multiple venues, those who attend shows at three or more venues in one night will be given a free beer.

It’s a small saving that Requena Ramos hopes will encourage movement from venue to venue, allowing attendees to explore more of the West End and to feel safe doing so.

“We’re very adamant that we want to let people know the West End isn’t a dangerous place. I feel like because of the shooting at the 7-Eleven and the other ‘crime streak’ of people stealing booze from the liquor commission or breaking into cars, I feel like we’re getting a bad rap,” he says.

“We want to put on a good show so we can get back in people’s good books as a neighbourhood, so we’re making a big effort to bring people over here to our home in the West End.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel