Cheat Sheet: Canadian Music Fest
Popular music fans rejoice! Canadian Music Fest (formerly CMW) kicks off tomorrow night with more than 700 bands at 45 different venues over five days (thru Sunday). How does a music lover even begin to choose what to see? From hip-hop to folk/roots, blues to alternative rock, the variety is practically endless.
As music programmer for City of Toronto Special Events I’m always on the look-out for hot new Canadian talent and this year’s CMF is loaded with rising stars. Here are my Top 10, must-see shows in chronological order . . .
A Literary Carnival for the Midwinter
An underground food court in downtown Toronto may be light years from the Venice Carnival but that was the atmosphere being conjured last Wednesday at BCE Place where Diaspora Dialogues set up shop during the lunch rush to promote A Midwinter Night’s Dream, happening Thursday and Friday at the Park Hyatt’s Roof Salon. Writers, musicians and performance artists will converge on the swish watering hole in an effort to banish the winter blahs.
“It’s an attempt to get out of the drudgery that we usually experience in mid-winter and to just let our minds go,” says artistic manager Philip Adams, “if you can’t physically take your body away, let your mind go.”
At the press preview last week, literary fortune teller Antanas Sileika, above left, had the punters lined up five and six deep to receive a private reading focused on advice gleaned from literature; poet Andrea Thompson, top pic, was composing poems on demand. Both writers will be doing their thing at the Salon this week.
Andrea composed the following poem for me in a minute or two and was adamant that I say as much in this post. “The poem is from you to Toronto,” she explained, as she wrote. “You can’t stop the muse, Christopher, you can’t stop the muse.”
WinterCity Feast on Flickr
Life conspired to derail my WinterCity plans last weekend — fortunately there were lots of local photographers who did make it out to capture the spectacular and spectacularly cold first weekend. I found a superb cache of photos on Flickr and have taken the liberty of pulling a few of my favorite shots to share with you here. Artist/photographer Alfred Ng shot the Flaming Lotus Girls‘ Angel of the Apocalypse, above, just as daylight faded into darkness. Jugolic captured the installation on video.
WinterCity Turns Up the Heat
The City of Toronto’s annual WinterCity festival kicks off tonight in Nathan Phillips Square with the first of many spectacular performances. The City’s Special Events programming team scoured the globe to select talent from near and far; France’s Compagnie Les Passagers and San Francisco’s Flaming Lotus Girls (see above) headline tonight beginning at 6 pm, plus there’ll be skating parties, ice sculptures and a host of tandem indoor events dubbed the Warm Up Series taking place around town through Februrary 7. Pictured left is Ottawa’s Jesse Stewart who’s inventive Ice Orchestra makes its world premiere Sunday (5 pm, 6 pm and 7:40 pm) in Nathan Phillips Square. A professor of music composition at Carlton University, Stewart also has a background in fine art, which helped enormously when it came time to create his ice instruments. Stewart will also play the waterphone: “I’m very interested in elemental things,” he says, “water, fire, metal, ice. And if you want to make music using those things, you pretty much have to make the instruments yourself.”
Toronto’s own Peter Jarvis, above, will also be on the square Saturday and Sunday offering a series of performance pieces including The Cube, the Subtonic Monks (”Dr. Suess meets Stomp”), the Three Legged Man, and the world premier of something called the Tubafish. Best known as his alter ego, Silver Elvis, Jarvis trained with renowned Canadian clown Richard Pochinko. “I’m a performance artist,” says Jarvis. “What interests me is the interactive and emotional elements of clown and mime. I’m also fascinated by the surreal.”
Dress warm and don’t forget your sense of wonder — see you at WinterCity.
Radiant Dark Lights Up Financial District
From a gloomy, Dufferin Street warehouse (last year) to a gleaming granite bank lobby, the high concept design exhibition Radiant Dark is always surprising. Organized by Canadian design retailer MADE, Radiant Dark touched down yesterday at Commerce Court West (199 Bay Street) in the heart of the financial district. The antithesis of a low-rent artist’s garret, the venue perfectly supported the title of this year’s show, Assets & Values.
This is the third annual installment of Radiant Dark (today thru Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm [6 pm Sunday], free), which was conceived to piggyback on the design buzz generated by IDS (now in its 10th year). I bumped into co-founder Julie Nicholson of MADE on my way into last night’s launch party and she was obviously excited about the venue, just then filling up with down-market hipsters. “We like to switch it up,” she said. “A bank seemed like the ultimate setting to explore the show’s themes of worth and value.” READ MORE
