St-Viateur parties again

>> Gaming giant Ubisoft
gives back to the street

MAIN STAGE GOES HERE: St-Viateur and St-Urbain

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

When St-Viateur’s annual St-Jean street festival disappeared from the cultural calendar in 2004, residents moaned and complained and cursed—rightly or wrongly—about an intransigent city bureaucracy and a lack of citizen initiative. Happily though, that’s about to change. On Friday, June 1, Mile-End residents will gather on the street for the first big street party in four years, with locally-produced live music, food, brown paper bags and art, thanks, at least a bit ironically, to the neighbourhood’s biggest employer: monster computer game producers Ubisoft.

But don’t assume this will be the Ubisoft festival on St-Viateur, says Cédric Orvoine, their director of external communications and public relations. The point, he says, is to give back to the neighbourhood that the French company’s Montreal branch has called home for the past 10 years. The party is, technically, a birthday bash, but, says Orvoine, other than a few banners and logos, the corporate presence will be minimal. Hopefully, he says, the party will leave the infrastructure in place to bring the street festival back year after year.

“Since Ubisoft employs about 1,700 people, and many of them don’t live very far from here, this was something we were willing to take charge of,” says Orvoine. “We want to bring back the old festivities. And it benefits [local merchants]. Ever since the St-Jean festival disappeared, they’ve been desperately trying to bring back some kind of activity.”

Along with the usual kiosks and food stands will be an art exhibit showing the works of local artists, live music and outdoor films—much of it produced by Ubisoft employees. “More than half the people who work here are artists, either painters or sculptors or filmmakers or musicians,” says Orvoine. “We’ll be merging the artists from Ubisoft with the artists from the street.”

Indie music fest organizers Pop Montreal will supply the party’s soundtrack. Among the performers are hip hop/klezmer act Socalled, who’ll be launching his new album, and critical sweetheart Patrick Watson, scoring silent films on a piano. Other bands will also play throughout the day.

“I wanted to make sure Ubisoft had the right idea in mind before I got involved,” says Pop’s Dan Seligman. “The event is about the neighbourhood, so I wanted to do it properly and to do it justice.”

It doesn’t hurt that so many of independent music’s leading lights live in the neighbourhood, even if the event is lacking in superstar-power. “We didn’t want to book big names for the headliners because that wasn’t necessary to justify the party,” says Seligman. “But we did make it a family-oriented, neighbourhood-friendly thing.”

There will be kid-friendly activities in the afternoon, thanks in part to the Mile-End Citizens’ Committee. Caroline Voisard, a committee member, says Orvoine reached out to them for help in getting in touch with authorities for permits and in figuring out traffic issues. “We also helped him get in touch with neighbourhood artists like Roadsworth, and with other parents from the Lambert-Closse school” on Bernard and St-Urbain.

She’s also glad Ubisoft isn’t going to overwhelm the party in an orgy of self-congratulation. “I really appreciate the fact that Ubisoft’s presence will be very, um, soft,” she says.