OSHEAGA’S NEW PLAYING FIELD

The Weeknd, Muse, Lorde headline

When Osheaga returns to Parc Jean-Drapeau this summer, The Weeknd, Muse and Lorde will share top billing with a new festival site.

Osheaga’s usual location on Île Ste-Hélène is being overhauled, with plans including a permanent open-air amphitheatre, which has displaced the festival across the river to Île Notre-Dame for two years.

The biggest difference in terms of layout will be the distance between the River and Mountain stages, which host the majority of Osheaga’s top draws and shared the main field in previous years. Those stages will now face each other on the hairpin turn of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

“There’s no place wide enough (on the new site) to put those stages side by side and get the capacity we wanted,” said Osheaga founder Nick Farkas, adding the festival will host the same number of people (roughly 45,000) as in previous years.

Attendees will have a longer walk from the Jean-Drapeau métro station to the new site, but “hundreds of thousands of people walk it for the F1,” Farkas pointed out. “It’s not even 10 minutes.” Many of Osheaga’s six stages will be closer together, “so there will be less walking on the site itself.”

And there’s a serious plus for agoraphobic festivalgoers: at the end of the night, when tens of thousands are funnelled to the métro, “the crowd might be more dispersed, because it will cover a bigger space.”

Farkas said organizers had been studying logistics for the temporary move for at least two years, and were intent on the festival staying in Parc Jean-Drapeau if possible. “To be able to take the métro to a festival of this size — there are not very many sites like this in the world.

“We always tried to do different things every year on the site we were on, so this gave our production guys and the creative-arts people a blank canvas,” Farkas said. “We have the same amount of stages. … We’re not going to skimp on anything, we’re not going to do anything radically different, but it’s going to be fun.”