Harvest Noir brings the spirit of Alice in Wonderland to Ottawa on September 30

Photo by byfield~pitman photography.

Greg Searle (@gregorysearle) is Executive Director of BioRegional North America (@BioRegional_US) where he runs @OnePlanetLiving and the ecoConcierge program, and is currently crowdfunding to support a book he is writing on sustainable behaviours and healthy urban living. He is the co-organizer of @HarvestNoir, loves working out of @HubOttawa, and once drove a Peugot with a trunk full of prosciutto ham from Parma, Italy to St. Petersburg, Russia. 

 There’s a reason discounted early bird tickets to Harvest Noir are selling out fast!  LTO called it “a smash success” last year, when 760 adventurous guests dressed in their finest black attire attended the first “chic picnic” in Ottawa’s history at a secret destination (revealed to be the Museum of Civilization).  Apartment613 readers voted it one of Ottawa’s “Sexiest Parties”, and I think I know why: Harvest Noir  combined the best of fashion, gourmet food, wine, dancing and a good social cause with a liberal dose of genteel public mischief.

As the organizers, we were awed by the kind of people who showed up at Harvest Noir, as much as the numbers.  There was enthusiastic audience participation in quirky happenings like the impromptu fashion show.

In the past when I’ve been lucky enough to live abroad in places like Rome and London and Boston, I could never avoid feeling upon my return to Ottawa that the people here had the volume turned down a couple notches. So it was especially touching  to see all these creative, daring, beautiful Ottawa souls letting their inner child loose in public, laughing and dining and dancing together… Harvest Noir was a hit because it gathered so many funky people in our city all under the same (architecturally stunning) roof! 

I can’t count the number of people who told me an event like Harvest Noir would never fly in Ottawa.

But when I saw my first European-inspired chic picnic in Montreal last August, I was certain that the concept was too cool to fail, even here! But something was still missing. What we needed was a real meaningful purpose, a REASON to throw the party of the year, and I found that in Ottawa’s burgeoning local food scene. Why not fuse a chic picnic with a traditional harvest ball? This really isn’t a new idea – a few generations back, people vigorously celebrated the harvest all across Europe in hundreds of culturally interesting ways all throughout the autumn.  In North America, Thanksgiving is the only significant surviving offspring of this lost tradition, but even Thanksgiving has lost its humble farm roots. 

Photo by Glenn Stowe.

>Harvest Noir asks its guests to step away, for just one day, from the usual ultra-convenient, cheap, industrially-farmed foreign produce found in every grocery store, and to eat something fresh and healthy from a farm you could actually visit without a jet. Prepare it themselves, and eat it with the biggest group of their friends they can assemble. If this sounds like some kind of hippie singalong tofu roast, just look at some of the photos from last year’s picnic - those are some well-dressed people eating some very fine food, and they are having a blast. 

 One guest told us that attending Harvest Noir last year was “like stepping into Alice in Wonderland”, and we seized upon her statement as the zeitgeist of planning the 2012 event.

We’ll let Local Tourist readers in on some of the ways we intend to make it bigger, bolder, and more downtown this year:

 

THE FARMER’S MARKET FLASHMOB.

• A few days before the event, Harvest Noir attendees will pull on their top hats and fancy fascinators and meet for a mass shopping flashmob at farmer’s markets to buy the ingredients for their picnic feasts. No one but our guests will know where and when this will happen.

 

THE SECRET LOCATION.

• On September 30, we’ll be partying in one of the busiest, most public places in downtown Ottawa. We are going to surprise a lot of unsuspecting passersby and tourists.

 

THE BICYCLE FLASHMOB.

• A large phalanx of guests in black tie finery will converge on a different secret location before the picnic, and then pedal  in stately procession together to a triumphant late arrival at the picnic grounds where the other guests will be unpacking and setting up. We think this will make quite an impression, and be seriously fun for everyone!

 

THE PICNIC.

• Elegantly-dressed dinner guests bring picnic baskets stuffed with delicious local food they’ve prepared and celebrate the harvest with friends old and new. Guests will enjoy the dining experience of the year, accompanied by bottles of wine, refined live music, prizes and surprises, and quirky performers.

 

THE PARADE.

• Starting with 1000+ fiery sparklers, and lead by a funky parade band, the guests will depart the picnic grounds and march in a fantastic Mad Hatter Parade through downtown Ottawa, leaving surprised tourists and jealous passers-by in their wake.

 

THE PARTY.

• This year’s DJ dance party will take place in one of the most important cultural venues in Ottawa, and have more music/dancing choices for guests of all ages.  A participatory fashion show by audience members is back by popular demand!

 

THE FUNDRAISER.

• 100 per cent of proceeds at Harvest Noir go towards helping BioRegional North America carry on its nonprofit mission to create model places where genuinely sustainable, healthy lifestyles that promote a 70 per cent+ reduction in carbon footprint are convenient for the ordinary people who live or work there. BioRegional has been pioneering these approaches in places like the UK, California, and Washington State and now has a new focus on bringing innovative lessons back to Ottawa, where the organization’s North American offices are based at Hub Ottawa. BioRegional recently was invited to help steer the formation of the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict in the downtown core. You can pre-order “ONE PLANET LIFESTYLES: Creating sociable places where sustainable 21st century living is convenient” a new book that BioRegional is working on. A crowd-funding campaign is helping support the book’s extensive research and getting it published.

 

THE DRESS CODE.

• Guests must dress their best in black, head to toe. Avoid white if you can – it’s so anti-noir! Be creative, be bold, with a retro-elegant theme wherever possible. Quirky period hats encouraged! There are some fantastic vintage and thrift boutique shops in Ottawa where you can go to get creative without blowing the budget. I recommend fashionable ladies hats from Chapeaux Madeleine. 

 TICKETS ON SALE.

• A few discounted early bird tickets are still left on sale at harvestnoir.com – but they won’t last very long.

We can’t wait for this Greg! Thanks for the snapshot!

Harvest Noir: Q&A with Greg Searle

harvestnoir.com

Greg Searle runs the Mysterious Events Company by night with his beautiful co-conspirator Samantha Biron – by day, he is the Executive Director of BioRegional North America, an environmental organization. Greg has lived in Ottawa, Rome, London UK, Boston, and now resides on the banks of the Gatineau river in Chelsea QC just outside of Ottawa. He loves the local food scene in Ottawa, and the work done by great local groups like JustFood.ca.

So, we’re really excited about Harvest Noir. For those who don’t know, what’s this event all about?

Harvest Noir is a chic “dress your best in retro black costume” picnic feast celebrating the autumn harvest with food from local farms. It includes many surprises and live musical performances by a dance-oriented parade band, followed by a dance reception with fabulous DJs, world-class circus performers and other innovative surprises.

Harvest Noir is inspired by a 23-year tradition of genteel annual picnic dining and partying that originated in Paris and has been imported to Lyon, Amsterdam, Munich, Zurich, Berlin, New York City and Montreal.

It is a “destination unknown” event – attendees will only learn where they are going a few hours before the event.

Why the mystery?

If you think about it, we grew up with a ton of surprises as kids. Now that we’ve arrived at adulthood, almost nothing is a mystery. Human beings thrive on mystery – the fact that you cannot prove the beliefs of the world’s 6,000 religions is proof enough of that! Harvest Noir, flashmobs, and chic picnics are part of a growing movement of unusual participatory entertainment formats where guests don’t know 100% of what is in store for them, from the venue right down to some of the night’s activities.

It seems that Harvest Noir has a local/sustainability focus. Why?

If there’s anything that SHOULDN’T be mysterious, it’s our food. Modern society with all its advantages and 24-hour convenience has utterly lost touch with farms, fields, and where our food comes from. Most of us seem pretty content to have our food come to us shrink-wrapped anonymously in plastic from far-away places and farms we’ll never, ever visit, sometimes grown under dubious chemical conditions and harvested by people we’ll never meet who may or may not make a decent wage. Local food is more nutritious, it’s fresher, it’s way better for the environment, and when we buy it we invest in local farmers and in our own regional economy. It’s real.

Harvest Noir is taking place this Saturday, at a mystery location

What have you learned about Ottawa in planning this event?

I’ve learned that there are at least 600 adventurous people in Ottawa who have paid good money to attend an event without knowing very much about what will happen. It shows that there is an underbelly of imagination, style and creativity to a city that is branded as boring and was voted as the 8th worst-dressed city in the world by some fool at MSN.ca. And probably the best thing about Harvest Noir is that I’ll get to turn some of these 600 fascinating bon vivants into friends.

I’ve also learned that while we may lag behind other of the world’s great cities in lots of different departments, we have a really awesome local food movement – a big shout out to JustFood.ca for all their great work in helping ordinary people find shops and farms that offer healthier local food choices.

Finally, I learned that Ottawa’s DJ scene is surprisingly underground compared to Toronto or Montreal, and I have to thank Steve Martin at freshbeats.ca for helping us find our way to where the real talent lies.

What can attendees expect?

Tennessee Williams once said: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

What are you hoping will be the impact /takeaway?

We’d like to have people saying that nothing like this has ever happened in Ottawa before, and that they had so much fun they want more! I believe that something amazing happens at the intersection of flash mobs, fancy dress parties, audience participation, and really great DJs, and I want to make 600 people feel the same way!

We’d also like to prove that you can host a big event that has a positive impact on the environment, and that people will take a little better understanding of how to lessen their ecological footprints away with them after a night of fantastic partying.

Thanks Greg! We’re excited. Are you excited?