Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre (Manitou Mounds) is hosting an open mic café evening in the coming weeks. It had orginally be scheduled for this Saturday but will be moved to a new date after a death in the Manitou Rapids community.
The event is slated to be a casual evening of music, poetry, storytelling, and more featuring a specially developed coffee and dessert menu says education programmer Bobby Hudon
“What we’re trying to do at Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre is transform our space into a coffee house,” Hudon said. “We’re trying to bring an urban and sophisticated energy or ambiance into our space and invite people to take part in a collective risk-taking and share some of their local talents that we might not know existed there before.”
Anyone interested can sign up to share stories, jokes, or other knowledge they may wish. Anyone interested in sharing or performing can contact Hudon at bobby.hudon@manitourapids.ca. Anyone who performs will win a prize which may include free coffee/pastries, take-home bags of coffee/tea, and/or gift cards to the gift shop at The Mounds.
“We do have a few performers signed up already, which is fantastic,” Hudon said. “We’re looking forward to hearing people share these intimate pieces of themselves that they may not necessarily have had the opportunity to be on stage before this event.”
Hudon says they’re also hoping to change the mindset around coffee as well.
“We’re trying to do it in a different way because coffee is something that obviously we all indulge in and enjoy in our day to day life and we often associate it with work,” Hudon said. “So we’re kind of transforming this idea of utilizing this substance in a different way, so as to unwind and to connect and use it in a more casual manner and also use it in different ways. For example, we’re using the coffee as a way of creating ambiance, through its aroma, through its flavour, through its consumption as a way of adding to the event.”
They’ll also be using jazz as a way to set the mood for the evening, Hudon says.
“We’re bringing in elements of jazz into this as well,”he said. So when people walk in the door part of that ambiance change is going to be a simulation of jazz through sonic expression. It’s not going to be live jazz artists just yet, but when people walk in we are going to have jazz in the air as well.
The hope is to make the open mic nights a regular occurrence at the historical centre probably on a quarterly basis. Coffee Beans: An Open Mic Night was scheduled to run this weekend but will be rescheduled. The new date will be advertised through the the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre social media pages. Entry will be a $10 cover charge.
