Luminato’s return to receptivity
Director Anthony Sargent is ready for the doors to swing wide open for new ‘jaw-dropping things’
Anniversaries, big ones especially, tend to be marked with pull-out-the-stops blowouts.
The Luminato Festival, which turned 10 last year, topped any in recent memory. Hauling itself out to the Hearn Generating Station, a spectacular, derelict industrial husk in Toronto’s Port Lands, made barely habitable just in time for the festivities, it left in its wake an obvious question: What might the festival do for an encore?
Well, for starters, not that. “We did it to make a statement: that we are the city’s cultural R&D wing, that we’re the guerrillas that can pop up and do something spectacular,” festival director Anthony Sargent says. “We need to be ambitious, but let’s be clear: This is an evolving journey. And transition is a good word for this year, I think.”
If it sounds a little subdued for Luminato, whose name has been made recently on big, blustery affairs loaded up on star power, then you’re on the right track. If year 10 was about blowing out, then 11 will be about taking stock and moving on, a fact Sargent more relishes than regrets.
Over lunch recently on Ossington Ave., just a couple of blocks from Luminato’s offices in an artfully repurposed old school building, Sargent spoke with a matter-of-fact pride over the various i’s dotted and t’s crossed since he took the helm in the summer of 2015.
In April, Sargent submitted the first five-year plan in Luminato’s history to its board of directors and had it approved. Earlier this year, 11 years on, Luminato published its first ever annual report.
“There’s the startup approach — that buccaneering, wild west, takeno-prisoners idea that’s so important when you’re making a name,” Sargent said. “And that’s great for a startup, but you can’t do that long term.”
Thinking long term, of course, is what Sargent was brought in to do. A seasoned arts administrator with deep roots in the United Kingdom — he was the head of culture for the city of Birmingham and, just before coming here, built and ran Sage Gateshead, a huge arts and culture hub in England’s northeast — Sargent took quick stock of Luminto’s fast-and-loose approach.
Buoyed by a financial cushion from the province (it was given a one-time $15-million startup fund in 2008 by the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport) and a long-term commitment from lead sponsor L’Oréal, Luminato could afford to shoot from the hip — a spontaneous, go-it-alone approach that suited former creative director Jorn Weisbrodt perfectly.
But the luxuries of Luminato’s first decade won’t attend its second — the provincial fund is all but gone; L’Oréal, while still a sponsor, has stepped back — making for a very different makeup moving forward.
“Those two things removed the absolute imperative for advance planning,” Sargent said. Losing them — hardly a happy state of affairs, he’ll admit — could still be seen as a glass half full. “That $15 million was wonderfully spent, but it is spent now. Once I got over the anxiety of it,” he laughed, “it was actually very liberating. One really could start again.”
It’s a clean slate and a hill to climb. Since 2014, the festival has spent roughly $11 million each year, about 60 per cent of it from government sources. While that support is hardly gone, Luminato’s days of expecting carte-blanche government largesse are done.
Sargent cites the British Ministry of Defence, which spends more money on its marching bands than the entire country has for cultural programming.
“It’s a notorious statistic,” he smiles, “but it tells us we must look more broadly at our opportunities.” Matching projects to ministries outside the cultural envelope — Indigenous Affairs or the Status of Women — are the start of his thinking.
“I like it to be a more organic dialogue than ‘We do a festival, give us the cash.’ I don’t see that as a very elevated conversation,” he said. “It’s more about how we can add value to their ambitions.”
Case in point: This year, the festival received funding from Ontario 150 for Tributaries, its opening-night free public performance of 60 artists paying homage to Indigenous women and culture.
Luminato is now looking back to move forward. Riding alongside Sargent is Josephine Ridge, his new creative director and a veteran festival programmer from Australia who sees things much the same way.
Where Luminato’s earliest itera- tions seemed loose and friendly, recent years had made it dense and less approachable, a reflection of Weisbrodt’s intense creative rigour. Productions got larger and more complex. Apocalypsis, in 2015, assembled more than 1,000 performers, lasted hours and cost more than $1 million all on its own; David Byrne’s Contemporary Color, the same year, bashed together 15 full-scale high school bands to face off against each other in a cheeky spectacle of self-regard. Critical acclaim poured in, but the broader audience became increasingly perplexed.
“I think there was a slightly hermetic, introspective quality to how the festival was read by the community at large,” Sargent said. “The programming was quite steely and uncompromising, and I respect that to no end. But the cost of that was the proportion of the local community to which the festival meant anything had shrunk since the early days.”
Sargent speaks of creating more “entry points” — popular fare, amid the intensity — the un-Jorning, perhaps, of a festival that, until his departure last year, was the clear expression of his particular vision.
Sargent and Ridge mean to shift the vision to a gathering place where ideas are shared. (Sargent crossed over with Weisbrodt to produce last year. “I’m a huge fan of what he did and I love him to bits. There will be an entire chapter in my autobiography devoted to him,” Sargent laughed. “But I think if we had worked together for more than a year, we might have killed each other.”)
Shortly after his arrival, Sargent recalled Weisbrodt returning, crestfallen, from a meeting with one of the city’s big cultural institutions. When he asked what had gone wrong, Sargent said, “Jorn told me that all they wanted from us was a helping hand to achieve their own vision. It was one of those eyelid moments, where our difference was utterly exposed; Jorn thought that’s not what we’re here to do at all and I thought, actually, that’s exactly what we’re here for. Of course we’ll have our own ideas, but we are here, fundamentally, to enable extraordinary things to happen in this city in collaboration with other people, full stop.”
For Sargent, it was about starting fresh. “Several great local leaders have said to me that it wasn’t always easy to have a natural to-and-fro about working together with the festival, which just can’t be so,” he said.
“Everything about the festival’s relationship with the cultural community needs to be more collaborative. We have to bring into that generosity of spirit an openness and receptivity to people’s ideas other than our own. And I don’t think that has been the festival’s reputation.”
It was a notion that had to be seen to be believed, Albert Schultz said. Schultz, artistic director of the Soulpepper Theatre Company, admits he was dubious about the incoming Ridge and Sargent. Since their arrival, he says he’s been “almost overwhelmed by (their) generosity and curiosity,” calling his conversations with them “full of promise.”
It’s a return to the founding idea of the festival, hatched as long ago as 2004, when David Pecaut and Tony Gagliano first dreamt it up with fertile local crossover in mind.
“In the early days, David and I were on our knees, begging talent to help us build this thing,” says Gagliano, Luminato’s board chair (Pecaut, for whom the downtown plaza that serves as the festival’s home base is named, died in 2009). “But we always saw it as a platform, eventually, for local organizations to build and grow from.”
Nonetheless, 11 years in, Weisbrodt’s stamp is the only reason Luminato has the international brand name, and platform, its founders envisioned (the Hearn, for one thing, was all him). Put together, it makes for a curiously functional partnership, once removed.
Think of it as a startup, phase 2, and for Sargent the real work starts as soon as the festival goes dark. “We’ll open our doors as wide as we can,” he said. “My interest is in allowing jawdropping things to happen here, because we all gain from that. If we can do it together, we gain that much more.”