A new hip-hop festival will bring bilingual beats from across the National Capital Region to downtown Ottawa in September.
BlokJam was announced as the winner of NextFest, Ottawa Festival Network (OFN)’s latest contest for young people to produce their own one-day festival. All participants received mentorship and training sessions throughout the contest, and the winners were awarded with full funding to stage the festival of their dreams.
BlokJam will be a free event during the day to promote a family-friendly atmosphere with DJ showcases and dance-offs. As the sun sets, a $20 entrance fee will take effect as the block party transforms into an immersive concert.
Julien Fontaine-Carbonneau, Scarlet Torraka, Jacob McGuire, Frédéric Doiron and Breanna Smith are behind the festival.
“We are reuniting the pillars of hip-hop, which is rap, DJ-ing, breakdancing and graffiti art,” Fontaine-Carbonneau said. “The idea is to simultaneously have music and visual art in a block party style.”
Making up for missed opportunities
The team only started working on BlokJam in December, but they are no strangers to the Ottawa-Gatineau hip-hop scene.
Frédéric Doiron has owned a Gatineau recording studio for the last several years. He noticed a lack of opportunities in the region for local artists.
“There are a lot of artists in Gatineau and Ottawa that really want to be on stage, but they are forced to go to Montreal or Toronto,” he said.
BlokJam’s goal is to become an annual event that acts as an incubator to spotlight Ottawa-Gatineau creatives.
“Our goal is to bring [local] artists to light and eventually help them grow their community while putting Ottawa on the map,” Doiron said.
Fontaine-Carbonneau helps pitch the idea of the festival. (Emma Cole)
BlokJam’s budget is still not yet finalized, but funding for the festival is expected to come from private sponsor support and city grants.
Even though BlokJam is the only entry to receive full funding to organize its festival, OFN will continue working with the other six groups. They have been paired with an industry mentor to help develop their pitches.
Other ideas included a textile workshop focused on clothing longevity and an interactive film festival where the audience communicated with each other through live blogs and polls while watching the movie.
In addition to BlokJam’s bilingual approach, other pitches answered accessibility concerns with pay-what-you-can pricing and designated areas for people with neurosensitivity.
A need for education in the event management space
Tara Shannon, OFN’s executive director, said she created NextFest as a pipeline for new youth programming ahead of Ottawa’s 200th anniversary.
Although the competition was stiff, BlokJam stood out to Shannon as an idea that had “longevity written all over it.”
“They were in it from day one,” she said. “My hope is that we help launch them and we will be talking about this festival for 30 years.
(Patrick Louiseize/CBC)
Shannon says the engagement from young people throughout the contest showed a crucial need for similar initiatives.
“We accidentally tapped into this gap between event management programs and what’s available in formalized education,” she said.
NextFest was supposed to be a one-time contest, but after Algonquin College cut its event management program, Shannon is considering making it an annual program.
“[Many] of those programs affect skill development in the event space,” she said. “There is a conversation now on the need to potentially continue this type of education.”