Up Here festival is a lot like a wacky scientist’s experiment.
For starters, there are a lot of bright lights, weird noises and unlikely pairings that combine to form the unexpected. This isn’t entirely unintentional, or simply superficial.
“We like to think of Up Here as a laboratory festival where artists and our team are free to test new things out,” explained Christian Pelletier, one of the three co-founders of Sudbury’s urban art festival.
This year, the Up Here team put a bunch of new hypotheses to the test for the festival’s third edition that ran Aug. 18 to 20. The results are looking promising already.
“It's still a little premature to really say what next year will look like but we can say that we found success in almost all of the new things that we tested out this year,” said Pelletier.
Some of the hits included new venues like Fuse and the McEwan School of Architecture, a late night dance party at Zig’s, and a chill, Sunday afternoon show for festival goers to wrap up their weekend at Theatre Cambrian.
“I think that our slightly hungover patrons really enjoyed the soft seats,” joked Pelletier.
Alongside these additions, the organizers actually scaled back the length of the festival, and the number of performances and murals.
“This year was a slightly more focused edition,” said Pelletier.
A noticeable consequence was the absence of the outdoor Durham Street stage, they swapped it for more indoor shows at downtown venues.
They moved the Saturday afternoon Family Day event to Memorial Park where it wound up drawing a record number of attendees for an afternoon of outdoor performances, kids activities, and mural tours.
Attendance overall was slightly lower than last years’, but since the festival scaled back from three days of performances to two, Pelletier said that was to be expected. They recorded a combined festival attendance of nearly 6,000.
On the other hand, they sold the same number of passports as last year despite the downsizing.
“Sudburians are really starting to grasp the festival's unique multi-venue vibe. It was really nice to be able to give physical passes to all weekend pass holders and give them the freedom to bounce back from venue to venue,” said Pelletier. “We've always done that with weekend passes, but the technology used this year made it a lot easier for us to track live entrances and ticket sales.”
While Up Here 2018 is still a year away, there are a few experiments bubbling away on the stove that may yield results before then.
“There will definitely be a volunteer appreciation party … we’re looking at doing some Up Here presents shows during the year ... and we've been toying with the idea of an indoor winter edition, but that won't be for another couple years probably,” said Pelletier.
“But we still want to take a breather and do a more formal postmortem with our team before making any of those decisions.”
Ella Myers is a freelance writer in Greater Sudbury.
