Luminato 2015 thinking really big
Ten-day festival will include events at huge venues such as the Hearn Generation Station
Toronto’s Luminato festival is broadening its reach for its ninth year.
This year’s 10-day festival of arts and creativity will have more family-friendly events — including a symphony concert where people can bring their pets — and will highlight the artists of the Americas in honour of the Pan Am Games.
And artistic director Jorn Weisbrodt has been locking up the largest venues in the city for the festival, including the Air Canada Centre and the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts.
Weisbrodt tried out the ACC last year for the Music Mob event, in which members of the public played along with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to Ravel’s Bolero, and decided to stage the festival’s first show there with the world premiere of David Byrne’s homage to school colour guards, Contemporary Color.
Weisbrodt is also using the Hearn Generating Station, which impressed him as the site of last year’s Luminato gala.
“It’s my favourite venue in the city,” said Weisbrodt, who announced Luminato’s programming Wednesday.
The massive decommissioned electrical generating station on Unwin Ave. will host Unsound Toronto, a mixture of music, technology, lasers, scent and synthesizers on the first two days of the festival, June 19 and 20.
It’s the Canadian premiere of Poland’s Unsound Festival, which creates innovative programming, discovers new artists and produces events in adapted spaces.
Tim Hecker’s Ephemera, which brings sound and scent together, is just one of the many unusual performances that will take place in Hearn’s 650 thousand cubic metres of space.
The Sony Centre will be reconfigured to accommodate the 1,000 performers in R. Murray Schafer’s epic oratorio Apocalypsis, says Weisbrodt, with many of the singers positioned in the balconies while the stage will be extended into the theatre.
“The whole performance is happening around the audience,” says Weisbrodt, adding he hopes to find funding for an archival film of the event.
The composition has only been performed once before, in 1980, but this is a totally new production, he says. The composer is 81 years old, Weisbrodt noted, and this may be his only chance to see this work performed live.
Weisbrodt is still searching for a large, outdoor square to host Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer’s installation that is both film and sculpture. Thousands of images are matched with sounds in a spontaneously generated sequence that will mean something different to every viewer, based on their own life experiences.
This free art project — called Look in my face; my name is Might-havebeen; I am also called No-more, Toolate, Farewell — is presented in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Weisbrodt says it will look like a fountain of images, continuing with the garden theme established at the festival Hub in David Pecaut Square by landscape architect Janet Rosenberg’s Garden of Light. Local greenhouses, flower markets and conser- vatories will help with the planting.
There will also be an imaginary rose garden, composed of photographs of roses sent in by shutterbugs that will be curated and presented digitally. Other highlights: The Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s free outdoor concert A Symphonic Zoo on closing day invites pets to attend too.
Art in Transit will showcase artists from around the world, who have never been to Toronto, in 10-second silent videos shown on screens on subway platforms.
Malpaso Dance Company is a Cuban contemporary dance troupe performing June 24 to 26.
Argentinean writer and director Mariano Pensotti will present four actors on an enclosed, rotating stage in El pasado es un animal grotesco June 19 to 21.
Indigenous Pan American food will be celebrated June 21at the Hub.
The Festival Shed in David Pecaut Square will host a cabaret series that includes turntable artist Kid Koala accompanied by four groups of festivalgoers on their own turntables.
Go to luminatofestival.com.