Chant’Ouest 2025: a new format redefines the French-speaking event in Western Canada

This year, the Chant’Ouest event is reinventing itself. Rather than taking place in the form of a tour across Western Canada, the musical event adopts a new format: a week-long show creation residency, which will be held in Edmonton, Alberta, from January 25 to 1^is FEBRUARY.

According to the organizers, the objective of this residency is to concentrate efforts on the artistic and stage training of artists. It will offer a series of workshops and rehearsals led by Pénélope Gaultier, specialized in directing and stage coaching, and Éric Doucet, responsible for musical direction and production.

The project coordinator, Alexis Normand, specifies that this transformation was motivated by financial challengeswhich offered the opportunity to rethink the event.

The Flying Canoe Festival will take place at the end of January in Edmonton, so we said why not try to harmonize our efforts and then pool our resources and put on the Chant’Ouest show as part of the festivalexplains Ms. Normand.

Despite this new format, the objective of Chant’Ouest remains unchanged, underlines Alexis Normand: to support and propel French-speaking artistic talents from Western and Northern Canada.

For the year 2025, four artists were selected: Sara Rose from British Columbia, Sylvie Walker from Saskatchewan, Jefferson Dabo from Alberta and Jeanine Guyot from Manitoba.

Before joining Edmonton, these artists will benefit from virtual preparatory sessions to refine their preparation.

Among the highlights of this residence include two school performances, on January 29 and 31, as well as a general public show scheduled for January 30 at 7:30 p.m. at the Cabaret de la Cité Francophone. The latter, organized as part of the Canoe Festival, will be offered free to the public.

New pilot projects

In addition to the residency, Société Chant’Ouest is inaugurating several pilot projects, designed to meet the specific needs of artists and professionals in the music sector.

Alexis Normand notes that these initiatives arise from an analysis carried out in the summer of 2024 with more than 50 artist-entrepreneurs from the North and West of Canada, aiming to fill in the gaps identified in their entrepreneurial development.

New pilot projects include Carrefour des pros, Piloting your career and Resource page.

The Carrefour des pros program offers personalized support to artists and entrepreneurs who have already reached important stages in their career, in order to help them consolidate and propel their professional trajectory.

One of the gaps identified was that in the West and the North, there is a lot of support for beginning and emerging artists, but the further we advance in our career, the less support we can say there is. So, the Carrefour des pros comes to fill this voidexplains Ms. Normand.

The Piloting your career program offers a series of virtual workshops intended to meet the most urgent needs of artists in Western and Northern Canada. These workshops will address critical issues for their development, regardless of their career stage, whether beginner, emerging or established.

Finally, the Resource Page is a new section of the Société Chant’Ouest website, which will centralize practical tools to help artists develop their careers and facilitate the promotion of their professional activities to French-speaking media.

The new pilot projects benefit from the support of renowned professionals from the Canadian, Quebec and international Francophonie, such as Carol Doucet, Natalie Aloessode-Bernardin, Gabrielle Gauthier-Durand, Fannie Crepin, Nelly Jourdain, Sarah Nadifi and Patrice Agbokou.

These new programs are trials. We’re trying to see if artists will use them. […] The idea is really to create bridges between the North-West music industry and other regions of Canada and Europe.specifies Alexis Normand.

With information from Philippine François-Gascard