Where is the one place in the city that you can combine dancing, drinking and dinosaurs?

That would be Nature Nocturne, a monthly party held at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

“Nocturne is really about creating a whole variety of experiences within one event so that it reaches as many people as possible,” said Cynthia Iburg, project leader for adult programs at the museum.

“If you think about a typical family museum visit, there’s lots of different ways you can experience a museum, so this event is meant to echo that.”

Every month has a new theme, “To keep it fresh,” according to Iburg. “We come up with them by looking both at what we’re doing in the museum and often tied to what we have going on but also we try to look for particular communities that we want to invite to be a part of this. “

The most recent party, held the evening of Jan. 24, had a “Horsing Around” theme, celebrating the Chinese New Year, the zodiac year of the Horse. Members from Chinatown Remixed, an arts initiative based in Ottawa’s Chinatown, worked with the museum to put together an amazing night.

daliselephants’s video on Instagram

When he’s not doing graphic designing for the Ottawa Citizen, Blake Sutherland runs Wide Angle Recordings, “a Canadian record label that focuses on quality electronic music with heart.” He also hosts a bi-monthly podcast called CityScape Sessions.  With the most recent Nature Nocturne, Sutherland got to do his first live podcast, which he matched with some amazing graphics. (See the result above.)

“The original idea was that we were going to do a whole bunch of stuff on the windows to kind of map the projectors to the windows and literally put cityscapes in them,” explained Sutherland. He and his team discovered the graphics, played over three separate projectors, worked better on the giant white wall of the museum’s third floor salon. There might have been some glitches in the set up, but the show was a success and Sutherland looks forward to doing more live performances in the future.