Tag Archive for 'Performance'

Episode 15 - January 30, 2009

Published
by
Blair
on February 4, 2009
in art, city and theatre
. 0 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to put up a new post, but finally, here it is - the first episode of 2009!

Katherine and I took to the cold last Friday night to witness the first performance of the new Close Act show titled PI-LEAU. Close Act has been in Toronto before a few years ago with another show, but they out did themselves with this underwater exploration and struggle between good and evil. The show opened the 14 day festival, WinterCity - a favourite among Torontonians at this time of year.

Not only does the city embrace the cold and snow for these two weeks, we also gorge ourselves on food during Winterlicious. Many restaurants book up quickly so if you want to take advantage of some of the amazing world-class cuisine Toronto has to offer at affordable prices, best to book now!

What are your thoughts on WinterCity? Do you embrace the cold, or hibernate for 6 months?

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Episode 13 - October 4-5, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on October 7, 2008
in Visual art, city, dance, film, music, new media, photography and theatre
. 1 Comment

12 hours. What a night! We started our journey at 6:30pm at City Hall and our heads didn’t hit the pillow until 6am the next morning …

There is so much to cover from this years Nuit Blanche in Toronto. So much in fact that it’s best if you watch the video! :) But here are some of the highlights that we saw on our travels:

Zone A:

  • Stereoscope, City Hall
    An amazing installation turning the windows of City Hall into a giant ping pong game and lighting canvas
  • Our interview with Mayor David Miller
  • Conversation #2, 900 Wellesley Street
    12,000 books laid together to create a beautiful sculpture. The different coloured spines even created moasic images wrapped around the sculpture.

Zone B:

  • r u part of the art?
    An interesting mobile installation - subscribe to a texting service and receive updates throughout the night with various things to do like sing the song from The Muppets (Menamena do do dee do do …). We didn’t see many other people doing it, but it was fun to randomly do stuff during the night.
  • Le Labo, Distillery
    A very calming video/sound installation (for the first while we were there) at Le Labo or Le Laboratoire d’art - a “francophone media and integrated arts lab offering opportunities in production, training & showings.”
  • Higgs Ocean, Distillery
    While they weren’t part of the ‘official’ Nuit Blanche schedule, this installation in one of the alleyways of the Distillery, was a highlight for us as it featured many elements from our youth - Lite Brite, a Big Bird lamp, and old films on video projectors! Unfortunately we couldn’t find any info on the group online - so if you guys see this posting, let us know where to find you!

Zone C:

  • Overflow, Liberty Village
    A smaller scale installation by Michel de Broin of a waterfall coming out the window of a 3 storey building and crashing into discarded furniture on the ground.
  • Imagine Peace, Liberty St. & Jefferson Ave.
    Yoko Ono continues to spread the message of peace with this installation. The public is given tags to write a wish on and the hang on the trees lining the street creating weeping willows of wishes, as it were.
  • I Promise It Will Always Be This Way, Lamport Stadium
    At 5am, watching mascots run wild to mid-90’s techno music was a lot of fun - and a great way to end the night.

We took tons of photos that night and we’ll be posting them in our Facebook Group as well as setting up a flickr home soon for you to view.

What were your highlights? What did you think of the 2008 Nuit Blanche?

Be sure to check out our friends over at Dear Toronto and their coverage of Nuit Blanche!

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Special Pre Toronto Nuit Blanche Edition

Published
by
Blair
on September 30, 2008
in TNIT Info, Visual art, city, dance, film, literature, music, photography and theatre
. 2 Comments

4 days left until at 6:52pm on Saturday October 4th, Toronto awakens for an all night contemporary art thing called Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. If you haven’t been yet … where have you been!? For the past two years, the popularity of this phenomenal free chaotic art frenzy has exploded - hundreds of thousands of Torontonians take to the street and experience art in Toronto like never before.

For those of you who have never been, Katherine and I have put together a little guide - 7 tips on how to survive Nuit Blanche and make the most of your night.

We are prepping for an all night vlogging thing and we want you to be a part of it. We’ll be heading from Zone B to A to C on our bikes. If you want to join us along the way and be a part of our evening, email us at info@nightintoronto.com and we’ll let you know where we are. You can also send us some tips if you know of a great installation we should feature on TNIT!

After we catch up on our sleep, we’ll be posting a vlog from each zone so be sure to sign up to our RSS feed to see the results! Oh, and we’ll also be teaming up with our friends at Dear Toronto to do some cross vlogging - should be a lot of fun.

Enjoy!

- Blair

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Epsiode 8 - August 12, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on August 13, 2008
in food, music and theatre
. 0 Comments

Have you missed us Toronto?! While it seems like forever since we’ve been on the air (well, it does for us) - we’re back! Katherine has moved into her new abode in the West end and I’m … well, still here. I was in Montreal for a few days over the long weekend, but I digress.

Last night we took to Queen St. West to partake in this years Summerworks Festival. We began our night at the Gladstone Hotel with 7 mini shows (we saw 3 of them) - all of which are under 15 minutes max. The shows take place in some of the rooms on the 2nd floor of the Gladstone which makes for some very intimate and interesting theatre - definitely worth checking out, in my opinion. AND, it’s PWYC (Pay-What-You-Can) … so for only $5 you could go see some really great new Canadian work!

Our next stop took us to the Factory Theatre where we took in the opening performance of Until June by Jane Maggs - a gritty new work about the relationship between two sisters. A great performance by the cast and wonderful writing by the relatively new Maggs.

Starving, Katherine and I headed west along Queen and grabbed a bite to eat at one of our favourite restaurants - Fresh, by Juice for Life. We gobbled down some delicious vegetarian food before heading over to our final destination of the night - The Theatre Centre - to take in some music and talk to Michael Rubenfeld, the Artistic Producer of the Summerworks Festival.

New to the festival this year is the Music Series - nightly performances by some great indie artists in Toronto including Matthew Barber, The Bicycles, Claire Jenkins as well as the two performers we saw, Julie Fader and Peter Elkas. Both performed great sets which we enjoyed thorougly. Sarah Harmer even made an appearance playing drums for Julie and we saw Ron Sexsmith in the audience!

At about 12:50am, we decided to call it quits as we were both exhausted and full to the brim of culture! It was an excellent evening. And thankfully, you too can still check out some of Summerworks as it’s on until August 17 (this coming Sunday)! Check out their website for more information on upcoming events …

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What we talked about in this episode:

Photo taken of traffic on Queen St. West and Dovercourt by Katherine Grainger.

Formats available:MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)