The Great Northern 2024 and 2025 Festivals

Organizational Overview

The Great Northern's annual festival will include approximately 50 events during the last week of January and the first week of February in the Twin Cities area that aim to change the narrative about winters in the North. The festival attracts tens of thousands of curious and adventurous attendees from Minnesota and beyond to its unique combination of art, outdoor, and climate programming. They are eager for fresh perspectives on deep winter, whether it's an outdoor, Only-in-MN dance performance, the festival's robust Climate Solutions Series, or an opportunity to sample outdoor winter activities like ice fishing and fat tire biking.

The way The Great Northern threads these focuses is unique and transformative. The festival's overarching goal is for attendees to experience the beauty of winter on a cellular level, and be inspired and motivated to preserve it.

The organization is poised to scale in a major way, bringing talent, tourism, and economic opportunity to the state while elevating the importance of taking action to preserve the winter weather that makes this place unique. The 2024 and 2025 festivals will include dozens of arts, outdoor, and climate-centered programs that will inspire and invigorate people of all ages.

The Great Northern serves a broad general audience that mostly lives in the Twin Cities and its suburbs, though participants from Greater Minnesota and other states and countries are growing as the pandemic wanes. They are adventurous and curious, willing to experiment with unfamiliar and unconventional programming because they trust the festival's curation.

The Great Northern believes that its distinctive platform unites Minnesotans around their shared love of winter culture and the outdoors. At the same time, the festival recognizes that though winter is a joy for some, it is a hardship for others. TGN provides opportunities for invigoration, community building, learning, and sharing through programming that engages a multiplicity of cultural voices and provides a full picture of the North. TGN and its partners are committed to building equity and access in all of its programming.

2024 Legacy-Funded Projects

During its 2024 festival, The Great Northern will mount the following arts projects:

Indigenous artist Nicholas Galanin, a member of the Tlingit and Unangax tribes in Alaska, will curate an evening at Minneapolis' iconic First Ave venue featuring Indigenous musicians and artists from the Northern US. In addition to Galanin's band Ya Tseen, which includes members from Washington and Alaska, the evening will feature work by Joe Rainey, Sr. (Red Lake Ojibwe) and his band Bizhiki, composed of musicians from Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Aku Matu (Iupiaq), who lives in Alaska. Galanin is also in conversation with Minneapolis visual artist Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota) to create a visual backdrop to the performance. She is a photojournalist, producer, beadwork artist, and writer.

The Great Northern is commissioning violinist Ariana Kim and composer Steve Heitzeg to create Music in the Dark (working title), a new work for solo violin performed in total darkness in a gallery space at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The audience will surround the music, taking a meditative form with pillows, yoga mats, or blankets to absorb the experience. A 15-minute composition by Heitzeg will be surrounded by an opening and closing of violin improvisations by Kim totaling 40-45 minutes.

The Great Northern will continue its partnership with Minnesota Orchestra, which in 2024 will include three performances by the Sphinx Virtuosi, a chamber ensemble from Detroit comprised of 18 Black and Latinx musicians. The ensemble will open with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Abels' piece "Global Warming," a nod to the festival's climate focus. The festival will contribute to a commission of spoken word to accompany the piece. In 2025 and beyond, the organizations will work together to create additional family and orchestral programming that points to the festival's themes.

The Great Northern is commissioning Morgan Thorson to create an outdoor nocturnal dance performance for extreme climates. Drawing its inspiration from the firmament of nightscape and the dynamic winter of the Upper Midwest, Untitled Night is a choreographic work created by a collective body of queer interdisciplinary collaborators. Untitled Night will be performed in January 2024 outdoors at Silverwood Park. An adventurous dance audience will be invited to witness and engage with dance, winter night walking, and star gazing. The neighbors surrounding the park will be encouraged to turn off their house lights during the time of the performance to enhance the experience.

Presented in partnership with Walker Art Center, Theater Mu, and The Great Northern, The Nosebleed is an intimate autobiography exploring playwright/director Aya Ogawa's fractured relationship with their long-deceased and enigmatic father. Through a series of turbulent, absurd, and poignantly comic vignettes, Ogawa reveals the seemingly insurmountable cultural and generational gap between them and their father, and the questions they face in their own motherhood today. A theatrical memorial and healing ritual for the audience, this darkly humorous, tender, and inventive play considers how we inherit and bequeath failure, and what it takes to forgive.

2025 Legacy-Funded Projects

For its 2025 festival, The Great Northern has multiple commissioning plans in the works:

-The festival is partnering with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra to co-commission a work inspired by bird migration by composer/environmentalist Gabriella Lena Frank and librettist J. Drew Latham, a birder and conservationist.

-The Great Northern will commission My Brightest Diamond's Shara Nova to work on a snow opera for children. The Subnivean Zone is a contemporary one-hour, baroque operetta for audiences of all ages. The work will be scored for 6 vocalists, a small instrumental chamber ensemble, and a chorus of puppeteers.

-Ryoji Ikeda is planning to adapt his public art piece The Radar for the Twin Cities, creating a digital projection of a map of the universe from the perspective of our region. He will pair the work with an indoor electronic installation commissioned by The Great Northern.