Attendees to 2-day Northern Lights Festival in Sudbury need full vaccination or negative COVID-19 test

Sudbury's Northern Lights Festival Boral returns with a two-day event in September, and attendees need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a medical exemption.

Ticket-holders who can'tbe vaccinated must have a negative COVID-19 test result within the past 48 hours or receive a rapid test at the door before admittance, festival organizers said in a newsrelease.

Performers, staff and volunteers will also need to adhere to the same vaccination and testing guidelines.

"We took a lot of guidance from the Ontario Human Rights Commission," said Krishna Patel, the festival's new executive director. "So they had a lot of guidance about how we should handle these decisions if we choose to go forward with the mandatory pre-vaccination. At this particular juncture, especially with the rise in cases from the delta variant, we just want to make sure that we are able to pull this off in the safest way possible."

In addition to vaccination requirements, attendees will need to wear masks when not in their designated seating area.

Last September, the festival experimented with drive-in concerts to adhere to the province's health and safety guidelines.

This year's two-day festival will take place at Bell Park's Grace Hartman Amphitheatre fromSept. 10-11.

The lineup will include headliners Dan Mangan and Jeremy Dutcher, as well as Tanika Charles, OKAN, Cindy Doire, Reney Ray, Dany Lajand the Looks, Frank Deresti and the Lake Effect.

"We're really excited," Patel said. "I mean, it's been so long since we've been able to dolive music, so we're just really excited and really gracious to be able to pull this off in a safe way for our community."

Mangan returns to the festival as the Sept. 10 headliner. He is a two-time JunoAward-winning andtwo-time Polaris Music Prize-listed musician and songwriter.

Dutcher will perform at the festival for the first time as Saturday's headliner. The performer, composer, activist and musicologist is a member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick. He studied music in Halifax and worked in the archives at the Canadian Museum of History, where he transcribed Wolastoq songs from 1907 wax cylinders.

"Many of the songs I'd never heard before because our musical tradition on the East Coast was suppressed by the Canadian government's Indian Act," he said in a release.