Yellowknife’s Still Dark Festival, a three-night wintertime festival designed to bring music to people in the dead of winter, was supposed to start on Thursday evening.
A couple of hours before showtime the territorial capital was hit by its longest power outage in months, lasting for four hours or more in some areas.
At about 10:30pm, the festival’s opening evening – which had been due to start at 7:30pm – finally started to crank into life.
HYFY and Upper Mall Rats were scheduled to play The Underground with an open mic jam session to follow.
The start time was pushed back multiple times as the outage lingered.
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More: The great January 1971 Yellowknife power outage
More: The almost-as-great April 2025 outage
“We’re going to push it to 10 and see if the power comes back on,” Taylor Shephard, an organizer of the festival, told Cabin Radio earlier in the evening.
“This is classic Yellowknife. We’re happy that the Still Dark Festival can really kick things off in the dark this year – we’re happy to fully embrace that.”
The section of downtown Yellowknife in which The Underground sits was, typically, virtually the last to regain power on Thursday evening. Even so, when the doors eventually opened at 10:30pm, a line formed for dedicated festivalgoers to get in.
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Meanwhile, across town at the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre, a theatre group had to swiftly improvise.
With the “abbreviated version” of Romeo and Juliet – a one-man performance, plus accompanying orchestra, painters and dancers – just a day away, a rehearsal went ahead thanks to battery-powered LED lights.
Miriam Bosiljevac contributed reporting.
