MUHC’s Bal Rouge Transforms La Nesra into a Bold Immersive Fundraising Experience — Produced by Total Events
This year, MUHC’s Bal Rouge, one of the city’s most significant fundraising galas in support of the McGill University Health Centre and the broader Montréal community, took over La Nesra in a spectacular transformation produced by Total Events. Hosting more than 600 guests, the evening delivered a visually striking, emotionally charged experience that pushed creative boundaries, while setting new benchmarks for scale, production ambition, and fundraising performance.
A Fundraising Icon with Real Community Impact
Bal Rouge is widely recognized as a cornerstone event in Montréal’s philanthropic calendar, generating critical funding that directly supports patient care, research, and hospital innovation at the MUHC. Each edition attracts leaders across business, culture, healthcare, and the arts, united by a shared commitment to strengthening one of the city’s most beloved institutions.
Delivering an event of this magnitude requires more than a beautiful room, it demands a venue capable of handling complex production, high guest volume, dynamic staging, and seamless hospitality operations. La Nesra was designed precisely for this level of execution.
Anaglyph Vision: Dual Worlds in Red and Blue
Total Events arrived with a bold creative direction: an Anaglyph theme, transforming the venue into a dual-vision world of red and blue. Rather than building from scratch, the production team expertly reimagined and converted every existing architectural and technical asset within La Nesra into a layered visual language, demonstrating how flexible infrastructure can become a creative accelerator rather than a constraint.
Through lighting, scenic treatments, projection, and spatial choreography, guests experienced shifting perspectives as they moved throughout the venue, a continuous interplay of color, depth, and motion that felt immersive, modern, and theatrical.
The result was not simply décor, it was a fully integrated environment where architecture, lighting, and content worked together to tell a cohesive visual story.
Built for Scale, Designed for Spectacle
La Nesra’s expansive footprint and dynamic ceiling heights allowed Total Events to execute custom builds, immersive showpieces, and elevated scenic moments at true gala scale. The venue comfortably hosted over 600 guests, enabling MUHC to expand attendance while maintaining strong guest flow, sightlines, and operational efficiency.
The venue’s integrated trussing system was leveraged to its full potential, creating layered lighting moments, dramatic reveals, and intimate pockets within a grand open volume. This ability to shift emotional scale within one continuous space is one of La Nesra’s defining strengths, giving designers full control over atmosphere and pacing without sacrificing capacity.
For large fundraising events, this balance of intimacy and impact is critical, allowing donors to feel emotionally connected while still delivering a memorable spectacle worthy of a flagship gala.
Immersive Video Mapping and Full Technical Integration
Total Events executed full-room custom video mapping, activating walls, architectural features, and overhead sightlines to amplify the Anaglyph concept and elevate the production value throughout the night. La Nesra’s technical infrastructure and rigging capacity supported the complexity of multi-surface projection, lighting synchronization, and show control, allowing creative ambition to scale without technical compromise.
As many creative agencies discover when working at La Nesra, the venue’s comprehensive in-house inclusions dramatically reduce production friction, accelerate build timelines, and unlock higher creative ceilings, enabling teams to focus on storytelling rather than infrastructure limitations.
This approach helped elevate Bal Rouge to new experiential heights and contributed to new fundraising records for the event.
A Seamless Culinary and Hospitality Collaboration
La Nesra’s operational flexibility also enabled a unique catering buyout model, allowing the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth’s catering team, led by Executive Chef Armando, to fully operate the kitchen while La Nesra’s experienced bar team delivered seamless beverage service across the venue.
This collaborative model ensured culinary excellence at scale while maintaining consistent service flow for a high-volume gala environment, a rare capability that allows clients to bring in preferred partners without sacrificing operational efficiency or guest experience.
A Night to Remember and a Partnership Built for Growth
Beyond the technical execution and visual impact, Bal Rouge delivered something even more meaningful: a warm, generous, community-driven evening that brought Montréal together in support of healthcare excellence. It was a night filled with energy, emotion, and shared purpose, the kind of experience that leaves a lasting imprint long after the final toast.
La Nesra is proud to be the chosen venue for Bal Rouge in the years to come, with the space offering ample room for the event to continue scaling, evolving, and breaking new fundraising milestones.
When creative vision, operational excellence, and purpose-built infrastructure align, extraordinary things happen, and Bal Rouge at La Nesra is only just getting started.
If you’re producing a large-scale gala, fundraising event, immersive brand experience, or custom production in Montréal, La Nesra delivers the flexibility, scale, and technical depth required to bring ambitious visions to life.
Event: MUHC Bal Rouge
Production Partner: Total Events
Venue Partner: La Nesra