So, after ten days and about a million plays, films, art installations, concerts and performances, it’s all over. Luminato has come to an end.
Until next year.
Luminato’s best and brightest are already fervently working away in the labs, working on a new festival for next year. We can’t say just yet who’ll be here for the show, but we can guarantee that it’ll be a blast.
We’ll see you next year. Until then, don’t stop being creative.
Categories: Uncategorized
Only one day left. What to do, what to do?
We at the Luminato Blog are going to spend our last day at Luminato hitting the binary system of Carnivalissima and the Distillery. In case we haven’t mentioned it ad nauseum, there’s a bus and a boat that go between the two, so there’s no excuse for not hitting both.
At Carnivalissima yesterday, the rhythm was inescapable. From the world marketplace to the main stage to the calypso tent, even the most staid and conservative festival-goers couldn’t keep their hips from swaying just a little bit.
Kofi Hadjor wasn’t even trying to keep from dancing. He helped to organize a Muhtadi-like drumming festival on the Harbourfront grass, with drummers in the First Nations, Brazilian and African traditions. Djembes littered the ground after the performance, spent.
“The politicians can erect borders, but we the people can take them down,” he said, adding that music is the best way for the varied international communities of Toronto to come together.
Later in the evening came the parade, led by the fire dancers and more drummers, and followed by men on stilts, and giant puppets, and children bearing hanging lanterns. One woman sat on the boardwalk with her dog.
“We have to be careful,” she said. “He’s afraid of the Stilt Men.” (Fortunately, we at the Luminato Blog are dog lovers, and welcomed this pooch’s protection-seeking nuzzling.)
Carnivalissima’s not over, folks, and neither is Luminato at the Distillery. Check it out:
Family Programming at the Harbourfront lasts all day today. Look for the kids with lanterns, or the face-painters, or the giant wheeled contraption near Queen’s Quay, covered in cowbells and cymbals and other percussive ephemera. You’ll hear it before you see it.
Michael Montano HD will be sending love and backbeats from the Caribbean out to the crowd, starting at 4 p.m. at the Harbourfront.
The Marilyn Brewer Community Space will be home to Carnival: The Spirit and Soul, an exhibit on theatrical narrative and masking.
The Fermenting Cellar in the Distillery District will feature percussion workshops and jazz all day, beginning at 12:30 p.m.
More Art of Jazz All Stars will appear on the Pure Spirits Stage at the Distillery beginning at noon.
The Distillery’s Lula Lubre Stage will, as it has all week, feature Afro-Cuban jams all day beginning at noon. (Note from the Luminato Bloggers: This stage rocks.)
Categories: Uncategorized
You know you look good. Everyone knows you look good. Look at you. You sly dog.
But you know what? You could look better. You could be wearing cool Luminato gear.
Shirts are $28. Baseball caps are $25. Wristbands — oh man would you look uber-hip in a wristband — are a mere five bucks.
Stop into any Roots store, or Bergo Designs in the Distillery District, to stock up.
Categories: Uncategorized
Photo by Tracy-Byers Reid
We at the Luminato Blog don’t like to eat our words. But we do like the opportunity to watch burlesque vaudevillians ply their trade for a little longer. So for us, it’s a draw. For you, gentle reader, it’s great news.
Yesterday we told you that Speigeltent’ntavern, Toronto’s premier destination for acrobatics, comedy and dancing in an early-Twentieth-Century milieu, would only run for three more days.
Thankfully, we were wrong: Speigeltent’ntavern has been extended all the way up to the end of June.
Shows will take place every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m., and every Sunday night at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $25 and can be purchased at the Harbourfront Centre box office.
Also in Toronto for an extended engagement is Pulse Front: Relational Architecture 12, the best place in town to go when you’re in the mood to see powerful search lights blink in time to your own heartbeat. Pulse Front turns on at dusk, and will be at the Harbourfront until June 17.
Categories: Uncategorized
During the run of Vida! A Celebration of Life, there are, in the lobby of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, a collection of posters and stand-ups advertising Cuban tourism. It’s probably a good thing there wasn’t some sort of sign-up sheet; the lobby would have been substantially more crowded than it actually was.
We’ll say this as directly as we know how: Vida is huge. During the most recent performance by Cuban dance troupe Danza Cuba, the line for tickets stretched down King Street and nearly rounded Simcoe Street. And that was for a Wednesday afternoon show.
The show, about one woman’s relationship to Cuba’s troubled and turbulent bout with the Twentieth Century, stars Omara Portuondo, perhaps best known to Northern audiences for her role as a vocalist in the legendary Buena Vista troupe, featured in the Wim Wenders documentary The Buena Vista Social Club.
Vida’s narrative — a chronological picaresque through Cuba’s history from the 1930s to the present — allows for series of set pieces of escalating beauty and complexity, framed by a birthday party and funeral for its main character. Costume and set changes abound; while the opening dance number features the all-female cast in the festive sun dresses viewers might normally associate with Cuban fashion, the style quickly moves to gauzy and ethereal during Vida’s girlhood introduction to Catholicism (where dancers in white dresses stand piously in cruciform) to sharp-footed and militaristic during revolution in the 1960s.
Anything featuring Portuondo will certainly feature music as prominently as anything else, and Vida! is no exception. Her voice is prominent here, though it’d be a failure not to mention the dancers’ feet, which function musically as much as the trumpet or the conga drum. Occasionally the band stands back and lets the stoming steal the show, a move that never gets old.
The chances are good that viewers will be exhausted by the end; Vida! is as visceral and as involving as any trip to the gym. But like the runner’s high that also results from strenuous exercise, it’ll leave you with a considerable grin.
Vida! A Celebration of Life runs throughout the weekend, with shows every night (and during the day Saturday) through Sunday.
Categories: dance · international · music · vida!
For one weekend and one weekend only, L’Art Boat will be shipping out late.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday will see two new loading times for Luminato’s specially commissioned arts-viewing sloop, for those of you who like your art late at night, and viewed from a boat.
Each night the boat will be loading every half hour until 11 p.m. at the Distillery District, and until 11:30 p.m. at Harbourfront Centre. Tickets are free.
Categories: Uncategorized
We at the Luminato blog know that love takes many forms: The love a mom has for her daughter, the love between two friends who hooked up one night a few years ago and might do so again tonight, to the love a ten-year-old kid has for a gigantic spotlight that responds to his hearbeat.
Love was in the air Monday night at the Harbourfront Centre.
Wanda and Blair, a mother and daughter who declined to give last names (which makes them extra hip, like Prince or Madonna), were on hand to spend some quality, post-college time together. Blair is finally home for the semester (she goes to Guelph) (go Gryphons!), and Wanda took a day off from her job as an office administrator for a chiropractor so they could spend the day touring Luminato. They took in Leonard Cohen’s Drawn to Words (“He’s a really talented artist,” Blair said) and headed to the Harbourfront for some traditional mom-and-daughter fare: A Hawksley Workman concert. They also took in The Stills. Like everyone, they’re fascinated by the spotlights that surround them, mimicking people’s hearbeats (part of Pulse Front).
“We wondered what everyone was doing, actually,” said Wanda, looking at the sky.
A few feet away stood Michelle Alexander and Kelly Penner, actors who just moved to Toronto from British Columbia and Windsor respectively. They’re not a couple. Not really. But if you ask them what their status is, they smile, and shift from foot to foot, and their eyes meet and they laugh.
“We have been in the past,” Alexander says.
They’re here to see Hawksley Workman, who, according to Alexander, was huge at the University of Windsor, where she and Penner went to school. Just huge.
A short walk away from them is the highlight (whoops!) of the evening: A little boy named Todd (his mother, Jocelyn, didn’t let us print his last name either). Todd isn’t here for Hawksley Workman. Todd couldn’t care less about the unique cabaret-rock stylings of Hawksley Workman. Todd is holding onto a pair of sensors like they were his only link to the real world, and staring at the light beam blinking on and off over his head. See, each of the lights of Pulse Front respond to anyone who grasps the sensors linked to them. They respond by blinking on and off, perfectly in tune with the rhythm of the grasper’s pulse.
“That’s my heartbeat?” he asks. “That’s awesome.”
Love. It’s a beautiful thing.
Categories: Uncategorized
Are you a festival insider?
Has anything cool or interesting happened to you during the festival?
Do you know any background information or gossip about Luminato’s shows, performers, events or places?
The Luminato blog is seeking submissions of anecdotes, stories and spottings to post on the blog.
We know you’re busy so all you have to do is call the Luminato Tipline and leave a message, any time of day or night.
The general guideline we tell people for the tipline is, “If you would tell it to your partner over dinner or call your best friends to share it, then people who read the blog will want to know it too!”
Please call (310) 928-3159 24 hours a day and leave a voice mail with your story–you may share this number with others you think will have interesting stories to tell.
Did you know there are two other ways to share with the blog?
1) You can comment on any of the posts by simply clicking on either the title of the post and scrolling down to the comment box or clicking on the word “comments” right under the post headline.
2) You can send your photos to us for uploading on Flickr.
Thanks,
Samantha Chapnick and Kevin Ott
Categories: Uncategorized
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