People & Culture

Creatures of the night: a Montreal all-nighter 

It’s all Cirque, no Soleil as Canadian author Heather O’Neill and her daughter Arizona take in the Nuit Blanche festival and extol the virtues of an endless night

(Photo: Tourism Montreal/Eva Blue)
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I grew up in an impoverished household in downtown Montreal. But I was exposed to so much culture, I was never starved for intellectual stimulation. In the evenings, the parks were filled with musicians and circus acts and theatre. I would sift through the local arts newspaper for the plethora of free activities put on by the city. I saw plays at the Monument-National theatre, poetry readings at the libraries, art exhibits and museums. 

Montreal has always been a nighttime city. It was famed in the first half of the 20th century for its theatres and concerts. There was never prohibition, and people arrived in droves to experience the delirium of a Montreal night. The city has continued to be defined by its sense of culture and art. The summers are filled with festivals and fireworks, and in the winter everyone scurries into chandeliered venues to watch ballet dancers, opera and plays.

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My daughter and I always love a challenge. Once we decided to listen to recordings of the complete works of Samuel Beckett. And we had trouble making sense for a week afterwards. We would say, “The milk is knocking about in the fridge, bring it to me.” This year, we decide to stay up for the entire annual Nuit Blanche festival. This is a night in early March where scores of galleries and restaurants and concert venues decide to keep their doors open all night. We will take in culture like Anne Rice vampires, until the sun rises.

My daughter and I live in buildings across the street from one another in Outremont. We come out of our entrances at the same time, jump into a cab and head downtown.

Arizona and I pause to take in the transformation of the Quartier des Spectacles. The area’s public square was built to be able to throw a party, to hold a festival, to put on shows. There is a ferris wheel bedecked with multicoloured lights. People are walking around with cups of alcohol from the newly erected bars. A DJ booth with loudspeakers blaring music has been set up. We step onto the dance floor area, which people are beginning to flood into, and suddenly a fog of dry ice smoke envelopes us, changing colour with the lights. Arizona is gone for a moment. And then she slowly appears before me again. She is gesturing that we should head east and see more.

There is snowboarding and skiing on the steep incline of Rue Saint-Denis Street. But I have never been a fan of skiing. We stop to look at some figure skaters putting on a show at the Esplanade Tranquille skating rink.

I’ve never been a particularly great skater either, if I’m honest. But skating at night in Montreal has been a big part of my life. When the ponds in the parks freeze, they are turned into public rinks. Loudspeakers play classical tunes as I glide past the skeletal trees, festooned with fairy lights that illuminate the falling snowflakes. I am always convinced in those dreamy moments that I look exactly like the elegant skaters I see now, hurling their bodies into spirals above the rink.

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Our first indoor stop is, of course, the Belgo Building. All the ateliers are opened to the crowds tonight. Once a luxury department store, the Belgo Building was divided up into ateliers by the garment industry. When the garment business left the area in the 1980s, artists began renting the empty lofts. It is now home to the largest concentration of contemporary art galleries in Canada.

I used to take Arizona to a dance class in one of the lofts when she was four. And we would wander up and down the halls peeking into the galleries. I’ve seen some incredible exhibits here. I have listened to lectures on the politics of sound, the semantics of vision. I took a movement class that had me become a spider.

Tonight, Arizona and I know exactly where we are heading. A brand-new exhibit of Canadian art star Shary Boyle is opening. Boyle’s porcelain figurines of dainty women in horrific poses have such a place in our hearts. She has shaken and subverted the role of women and craft in the art world over the past two decades.

We circle around her beautiful porcelain monsters in awe.

On a normal night that exhibit would have been enough for us, and we would have walked home discussing it. But next on our itinerary is a trip to the Espaces des Arts to see some bondage rope performance. Of course there must be some circus in our night, so it is best to get it out of the way.

Growing up in the ’80s in Montreal, I saw so many circus performers on the streets. It was considered an admirable feat to ride down the street on a unicycle. Those who were able to do it became famous, like strange gods. Jeanne-Mance Park was filled on Sundays with gatherings of people there to practise their juggling skills. Bowling pins and coloured balls would fly all around the park.

When we arrive, we watch a woman twisted in a series of ropes that crisscross her body as she rocks over our heads. It is provocative and sexy and sublime. Arizona takes out her notebook to sketch her.

“It’s like she’s a mermaid, tangled in a net,” she says. “I find it beautiful.” A woman next to me shakes her head. “If you want to tie yourself up, just do it at home. Why do you have to go public about it?”

“Because they are artists,” I say.

“I don’t know, there’s a fine line between artist and freak.”

“I’m sure they once said that about Guy Laliberté.”

Guy Laliberté, the founder of the Cirque de Soleil, once performed on the streets of Montreal as a fire-breathing stilt walker. No doubt, he was regarded by some as a fool. But it was this broke dreamer on stilts aspiring towards the stars who made Quebec circus into one of the greatest shows on Earth. He took the clowns who were singing in cardboard boxes in small lofts, and the beautiful girls juggling plates, and put them on the biggest stages in the world. 

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There are just too many people out on Nuit Blanche. It is important to choose your activities wisely because the lines are so long. We take a cab to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It is a big enough venue that hundreds can be let in at once, so there is no need for a line. The featured exhibition is on Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. The shows here are always creative and well thought out and designed to encourage unique ways to engage with the works.

Arizona, however, is opposed to this exhibition. She does not see the point of randomly putting O’Keeffe and Moore together. And she seems positively annoyed at it. “I just want to see Georgia O’Keeffe’s works. And they are forcing Moore on me.” I tell her to have no fear, there is always method in the madness.

When we see the exhibition, we realize immediately that juxtaposing these two artists accentuates their use of curves and landscapes. They work together like coffee and cream, ice cream and chocolate fudge, peanut butter and jam.

Then I check the time. We have tickets to see Kid Koala’s show, The Storyville Mosquito, at Place des Arts. Montreal-based Kid Koala is a world- famous DJ who released his first demo tape during his McGill student days. His act has evolved over the years to include stagecraft and performance art, so I have no idea what to expect.

As soon as Arizona and I get our seats, we see that the turntables in the centre of the stage are surrounded by a miniature city with diners and hotels and bus stops and concert halls. Kid Koala comes in, followed by a string trio. They set themselves up in the middle of the toy town.

They start to perform a score as the show begins with puppeteers all in black crawling around the stage. A small puppet of a mosquito arrives in a bus. He comes to the city and tries to make it as a clarinetist. He finds nothing but betrayal and failure. But then an acceptance of the fragility. It is heartbreaking and wonderful.

I am the first one on my feet when the show ends. I love being the first person to stand at the end of a show. It makes me feel as though I have roused a great army into battle.

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We walk through the crowds on Ste-Catherine Street, looking for churros. We saw someone walking and eating churros, and they informed us there were great ones at Le Central.

So many people are out that it’s difficult to walk in a straight line towards our food. I begin to find it annoying, and loudly wish they would all vanish and allow me to properly enjoy this night. I sometimes feel a little too much ownership over Montreal and find myself acting like the Ice Queen in Narnia.

We arrive at St-Laurent Street, where we find the new restaurant — really a fancy food court. The area was once the Red-Light District, before the city expanded the Quartier des Spectacles into it. A whole host of new fancy glass structures now host museums. Of course, they came at the expense of some buildings I truly loved.

I actually went to a protest to try to keep the old Red-Light District exactly the way it was. It wasn’t much of a protest, or one that pulled at the public’s heartstrings. We were asking that the street continue to be filled with drugs and homeless people and sex workers. We strongly believed every city needed a seedy spot. It was good for poetry.

My first novel was set on this block, with a little girl named Baby living in one of the buildings that was torn down. It’s difficult to explain to people the feeling when they destroy a fictional character’s home.

A couple of buildings got to stay, however. One is the Cleopatra Café, a strip club which managed to get heritage status, and the greasy spoon known as the Montreal Pool Room. I point out to Arizona that the Pool Room has moved to the east side of the street, when it used to be on the west. She says I say this every time we pass it.

“Well, nobody believes me. They act like it was always on the east side.” I point to the window that declares the restaurant has been in the same spot for a hundred years. “It makes me mad. Like I’m living in a simulation, and everything can just be changed at any moment.”

“Well perhaps we are,” she concludes.

We head to the Old Port to see the Aura Experience laser show put on by Moment Factory inside the Notre-Dame Basilica. A masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture, opened in 1829, the basilica is one of the most prominent and beautiful churches in Montreal, right in the heart of Old Montreal. The thing the church is most famous for, as far as I am concerned, is being the place where Céline Dion was married.

As we wait in line, the people in front of us ask if we know that Céline Dion was married here. “Of course!” we both yell out happily to these new best friends.

We all exchange our favourite Céline Dion stories. Apocryphal tales from her childhood, stories of miraculous performances, and speculations about her relationship with her husband that are worthy of Greek plays. It is as though the grand church in front of us is erected in her honour and she is a living saint.

Once we are inside, wild lights and lasers project all over the beautiful vaulted ceilings, and we are quiet.

We walk through Chinatown afterwards, on Rue De La Gauchetière. We stroll past all the different restaurants. When I ask for recommendations for restaurants in Chinatown, everyone always has a different one, and there is always another one to discover. Some are on the street level, some on the second floor, some in the basement. Laminated photographs of the meals decorate the windows. Posters of roses and flowers are taped to the walls inside. It’s so lovely to see all the restaurants filled with people so late into the night. The neon lights are bright pink and green. The decorated light boxes are all turned on. There is a beautiful ramshackle loveliness to it all.

Chinatown’s streets have a pentimento effect, hinting at the past beneath the present. You can see signs from long closed and forgotten stores still up on the walls. There’s a new restaurant inside an old pink flower shop. The restaurant’s owners changed nothing at all about the exterior, and you would not be wrong to think they were selling roses inside and not orange duck.

We get nostalgic about everything in Montreal. We would prefer nothing at all was changed or lost in renovations, no matter how mundane. Montreal’s Chinatown has recently been given heritage status, to preserve it from the rapacious speculators who would steal its charm. 

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To avoid the crowds as we head back downtown, we walk down a small street no bigger than an alley, framed on either side by grey Victorian houses that were probably once brothels or the homes of the less successful gangsters.

One of the most magical things about Montreal is how it feels safe at night. As children, we went back out after supper to sit on stoops and smoke candy cigarettes. We played on our bicycles in the parks until we heard our family whistles crying for us like crickets under the full moon.

Few associate darkness with crime. For most, it sparks wonder and fun. Suddenly a rat darts out from behind a garbage can. We screech hysterically, and as we emerge back onto St-Laurent, crying out that a rat is upon us, everyone else starts screaming, too. It is the most frightening thing of the night.

We head up to St-Hubert Street to look at ice sculptures. And then we go to a film screening in Mile End. I am starting to get tired, and am tuning in and out of what Arizona is saying.

“There was a time when they put cocaine in everything,” Arizona says. “Toothpaste, cola, baby formula, shampoo.”

“What are you on about?” I say. “There was never cocaine in shampoo.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s so late, I’m becoming delirious.”

This is where Arizona and I part ways. She meets up with a friend to go to a rave at the old Métropolis concert hall. They think it’s a good time to go because it is almost dawn and fewer people will be there. When we had passed by before, there was a lineup around the block. The theatre was a skating rink when it first opened in 1884. Then it became a theatre where Sarah Bernhardt famously performed in 1905. In the 1980s it became a discotheque, and I always imagined dancing there when I grew up.

There is something to be said for dancing at dawn. But it is not for me tonight, or this morning. The sun is about to come up, and I have to find my little coffin to rest my vampire bones.

I decide to take the metro home, since, unusually, it is open all night for Nuit Blanche.

When I was little, my elementary school teacher once told the class that the Montreal Metro was the largest art museum in the world. I was taken with this idea. Every time I rode the subway, I thought about this.

It made me stop and look at the different murals and mosaics on the walls. It made me observe how the floor and wall tiles were of different configurations and colours at each stop. It made me feel that every time I was taking a trip, even the journey was a cultural experience. It made me notice how much public art there is in Montreal. How art and poetry are central to Montreal’s identity.

I begin to doze off. When I open my eyes for a moment, there is a girl of 14 sitting across from me. She is dressed in a multicoloured ski jacket and frayed jeans. I startle awake, and the girl vanishes. And I realize I have just come across my old self, riding the metro on an alternate metro line, with a whole future filled with artistic expression ahead of her

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