Chris Lorway won’t be on stage performing at any of the dozens of Luminato events set to light up the city over the next 10 days, yet his imprimatur is attached to every show courtesy of his role as Artistic Director of the festival. It’s a dream job, the kind of gig programmers the world over would walk through fire for.
“I’ve been really fortunate to find myself in the right rooms with the right people when exciting projects were coming together,” says Lorway with what sounds like genuine humility. At the age of 37 his resume is already impossibly accomplished. Born in Cape Breton, he did his undergrad at Dalhousie and his masters’ degree (arts administration) at Columbia: he helped found Nova Scotia’s Celtic Colours International Festival, and he’s done stints at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (where he first met Luminato CEO Janice Price), the San Francisco Opera and the Edinburgh Festival. He’s also consulted on projects in London, Hong Kong and New Orleans.
“When the idea of Luminato came up in 2007, I thought it was a great time to come home and see what was happening in Canada,” says Lorway. “Being part of a start-up is also one of my favourite things to do.”
His mandate from the outset has been to “seek out work in which there’s an opportunity for Canadian artists to be seen in an international context and also to choose work that involved collaborations between Canadian artists and international artists.”
A perfect example of one such collaboration is The Africa Trilogy, currently in previews and opening Tuesday at the Fleck Theatre (207 Queen’s Quay West). Originally conceived by Ross Manson, left, artistic director of Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, The Africa Trilogy features the work of three playwrights and three directors from six countries on three continents with a production team from around the world.
Manson approached Lorway with the idea three years ago, shortly after his return to Canada to helm Luminato’s programming. “In some ways it became the perfect project for the festival,” says the Artistic Director, “because of the scale of the piece and the notion of a local company wanting to be on the international stage and taking a really close look at an important world issue. So for me, The Africa Trilogy was a no-brainer and once we started to see it move forward, the more exciting it became. I’m confident the work will have a life well beyond Luminato in Canada.”
From a programming perspective, Lorway explains that each iteration of Luminato – this year’s festival is the fourth annual installment – grows organically in relation to a handful of anchor events, in this case, The Africa Trilogy and Rufus Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna.
“When the curatorial team in our office starting discussing the Trilogy,” says Lorway, “it started to grow beyond Africa and the divisions between east and west, into a discussion of our own country and how different it is when you travel from coast to coast. Thus, we have East/West in Canadian Fiction (June 15), a literary program that looks at writers from across the country and how their sense of place is almost a separate character in their books (below). So, in that way, The Africa Trilogy informed some of the other programming choices.”
“Prima Donna is also a commission and we thought we could have some fun with the notion of the prima donna or the diva, which carries through a number of different programs: our Yonge/Dundas Square program this year is devoted to cross cultural divas, so we have Canadian divas like Melanie Fiona, Jully Black and Sass Jordan, and then we have a Latin Divas night, a Queer Divas night, a Bollywood Divas night and an 80s night. And we’re bringing in one of Japan’s biggest pop stars, Maki Nomiya, on Wednesday for an evening of J-Pop Divas.”
Speaking with Lorway, I’m struck by the degree to which he exemplifies Richard Florida’s theories about the mobile creative class; like Florida, he could work almost anywhere and he’s chosen Toronto, at least for now.
“I love the diversity of the city,” says Lorway. “We have a home-grown audience for almost everything we present. For instance, when we brought in the great Balkan star, Goran Bregović last year, we had a huge, huge turnout from the Serbian and Croatian communities from across Ontario. So we’re finding that when we do this, we get a mixture of what might be the stumble-by audience but also a great draw from the communities to which the artist is associated.”
When I spoke with Lorway on Wednesday he was still recovering from jet lag, the result of a 36-hour trip to Zagreb the previous weekend for the International Society for the Performing Arts Congress (ISPA). In 2011, the congress will be held right here in Toronto with dates overlapping the fifth anniversary of Luminato.
“The ISPA event will bring in 300 – 400 of our international colleagues who run the big performing arts centres around the world,” says Lorway, “so it will be a really exciting year.”
Needless to say, we can count on Luminato’s programming wizard to stick around for at least another year behind the curtain.
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