Black is the new white at Ce Soir Noir, a free-for-all outdoor grassroots dinning alternative to the invite-only Dîner en Blanc.
Vancouver artists Graeme Berglund and George Vergette have organized Ce Soir Noir, a cheeky version of the exclusive Dîner en Blanc, a coveted and highly photographable affair where a select group of guests dine in white. Billed as a free, democratic, ad-hoc offering that will include a culturally and economically diverse group of attendees and open to anyone who wants to picnic in black, Ce Soir Noir is being held on the same evening as the white party (Tuesday, Aug. 25).
“We never really wanted to posture this as an anti-Dîner en Blanc,” Berglund explains. “We just kinda felt like there was the public response to what Dîner en Blanc stood for in the year 2015, and also in a city that has some very diverse people in it. Also, within a very complex and struggling creative industry and based on a lot of comments from my friends and peers in the city, [we] thought that launching this alternative event would foster greater discussion around the existence of both events – one of them being very exclusive and the other one being very inclusive.”
The colour black was chosen for its egalitarian appeal as a shade that most people already have in their closet.
“Just talking about it amongst my guy friends, if they went to Dîner en Blanc they would literally have to go buy an entirely new outfit, where everybody actually owns black,” Berglund explains. “You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find somebody without black jeans and a black T-shirt, regardless of their sex or financial background.”
When Berglund and Vergette came up with the idea of a free-for-all picnic, they expected it would attract a couple hundred interested people and have a fairly low impact on their lives.
“Boy, were we wrong,” Berglund says.
Five hundred people responded to the Facebook page within 24 hours of it going up. The number of people who say they are attending the picnic at Crab Park in the Downtown Eastside has jumped to more than 1,500.
“The best thing that has come out of it so far is just simply the conversation; I think people are discussing the difference between affluence versus cultural commerce,” says Berglund.
Dîner en Blanc began as a Parisian picnic for a handful of friends and is now an international phenomenon with cities around the world participating in the white-drenched dinner. In Vancouver, the first Dîner en Blanc was held in 2012 starting with 2,000 seats and ballooning to approximately 4,500 this year – with 30,000 people reportedly on the waitlist. The event, known for getting heavy play on social media with attendees filling up feeds with white-washed selfies, has an air of exclusivity (though it only costs $37 to attend and $8 in annual membership fees) with required invites and hush-hush locations in public parks where diners are fenced in from outsiders. The appeal of the original Dîner en Blanc, for Berglund, was the gathering of strangers.
“It struck a cord with people. I think that people do have a deeper desire – just as human beings – to connect with other people and share interests and converse and eat food,” he says, insisting that Ce Soir Noir, which runs from 5-11 pm at Crab Park, isn’t meant to be a rally against Dîner en Blanc.
To bring in a charitable component to the event, Ce Soir Noir organizers have partnered with Community First Foundation to support their Backpack Buddies program, which helps feed over 400 elementary school children per week in East Vancouver, and are requesting that people bring non-perishable food items geared towards kids to the picnic.
Attendees are also asked to bring food, beverages, blankets, and friends (but no dogs). In the interest of keeping it real, no fancy candles dbut rather bring “those tiny crappy battery powered fake plastic candle lights,” the Facebook post reads.
Being that it is Vancouver, if the rain hits the whole thing is called off – as the post says, “it's a Netflix night” instead.
UPDATE: Heading to #cesoirnoir15 tonight? Guests can download a "soundscape" at cesoirnoir.com to take part in a sonic experiment.
