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• News

  2009 in review: Top 10 Toronto news stories

  

  Posted by Stephen Humphrey at 5:01 pm on January 1, 2010
  1 Comment 1 image
  

  With the cloud of recession hanging over it, Toronto endured a smelly six-week garbage stike and saw one of its most beloved bookstores close.

  Torontonians heard announcements that the city’s approach to transit was being re-imagined for the coming decade, but also that the mayor wouldn’t stick around past the next election. One colourful political figure announced he was leaving provinicial politics to make a bid for mayor, while an Etobicoke MP began his audition for the role of prime minster.

  Cancer took the lives of a talented local singer and an admired shaper of cultural events.

  Toronto couldn’t get through the year without its share of bad behaviour, as demonstrated by the convication of a pipe-swinging serial bike thief and an altercation between a cyclist and a politician’s convertible which left a bike-rider dead and a political career in ruins.

  Experts now claim the economy is rebounding. Here’s hoping some of that good news trickles down during the coming year.

  (More …)

   

• Superfeed

  Remembering David Pecaut and his love of Toronto

  

  Posted by Superfeed Editor at 8:02 pm on December 14, 2009
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  From Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

  Around 10am this morning, one of Toronto’s great civic leaders passed away after a two year battle with cancer. David Pecaut was the Chair and founder of the Toronto Summit Alliance, and was a major force behind Greening Greater Toronto, DiverseCity, Emerging Leaders Network, as well as leading The Boston Consulting Group. Last week, David sent out a mass email to his friends and colleagues outlining how he views the future of Toronto. Spacing received permission to re-print his letter.

  (More …)

  More Toronto news

   

• Arts

  Cirque du Soleil a fitting swansong for Luminato 2009

  

  Posted by Luke Champion at 4:29 am on June 15, 2009
  No Comments 5 images
  

  Luminato’s last breath for 2009 came baited with some of the festival’s premier offerings.

  The nine-day festival – which brought theatre, dance, music and public installations into public spaces – culminated on Queens Quay with one final performance from Cirque du Soleil.
  (More …)

   

• Arts

  1000 Tastes of Toronto puts a gourmet spin on street food

  

  Posted by Rahul Gupta at 3:52 am on June 15, 2009
  No Comments 10 images
  

  “We’re completely sold out,” chef Marco Santaguida of Santaguida Fine Foods told a disappointed customer hoping for the last of his 600 grilled chicken and Brie sandwiches.

  Santaguida and helpers sold all of their popular sandwiches, served on a toasted baguette and garnished with fire-roasted red pepper, in only three hours. They were one of the countless local restaurateurs and caterers offering affordable eats on a sunny afternoon on the waterfront during President’s Choice 1000 Tastes of Toronto, which took place on the final weekend of the Luminato festival.

  (More …)

   

• Arts

  Fans climb the walls at Luminato event

  

  Posted by Mike Crisolago at 3:45 am on June 15, 2009
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  As Cirque du Soleil performers climbed, swung, hung and leapt from two giant metal spheres near the Harbourfront’s Music Garden, yellow-clad security guards patrolled the area. It seems the problem with art meant to engage the public is that sometimes the public gets a little too familiar.

  On the final weekend of this year’s Luminato Festival, Cirque du Soleil performed free shows every 30 minutes at two venues along the Harbourfront. But low stages caused even lower visibility for the crowds gathered to watch the shows, prompting some to climb the large metal spheres that enclosed the performances.

  “They ask if it’s dangerous and it’s like, ‘C’mon, think about it for a second,’” one frustrated security guard said.
  (More …)

   

• Arts

  Short films thrill weary Poe fans on Luminato’s final day

  

  Posted by L.C. Willis at 11:07 pm on June 14, 2009
  No Comments Video
  

  As the Luminato festival draws to a close this weekend, festival-goers bid farewell to this year’s celebration of all things dark and dreary.

  In recognition the 200th anniversary of the birth of American author Edgar Allan Poe, Luminato featured an eclectic mix of theatre, cabaret, literary readings and film devoted to the memory and influence of the tragic poet. (More …)

   

• Arts

  Local authors explore the city’s dark side

  

  Posted by Meghan Housley at 6:48 pm on June 14, 2009
  No Comments 1 image
  

  In an old, ivy-covered church, tucked behind the Ontario College of Art and Design, ghostly patterns, the only source of light, fly across the walls. Though the pews are packed, the only sound is the humming of ceiling fans as a full house awaits six very different tales of a ghostly, and sometimes ghastly, Toronto.

  Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre, held last Wednesday at St George the Martyr, was one of a handful of events at this year’s Luminato to pay homage to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe.
  (More …)

   

• Arts

  Punk performance is a bad idea that’s not addictive enough

  

  Posted by Russ Martin at 12:19 am on June 14, 2009
  No Comments 3 images
  

  Real punks don’t go to Luminato.

  But that didn’t stop the festival from billing director Jay Scheib’s Addicted To Bad Ideas as a “multimedia punk rock spectacle show.” A spectacle the show undoubtedly was, but the rest of the pre-show rhetoric fell flat on Friday night when Scheib’s concept came to life at the Phoenix Concert Theatre.

  A hit at festivals like New York’s Under The Radar festival, Addicted To Bad Ideas had a surprisingly low draw in Toronto. Part punk rock performance and part live film installation, the show meshes film clips featuring underdog actor Peter Lorre with a concert by Brooklyn-based punk collective the World/Inferno Friendship Society.

  (More …)

   

• Arts

  Screen-based civilization eats itself in Continuous City

  

  Posted by Stephen Humphrey at 3:07 am on June 13, 2009
  No Comments 1 image
  

  We live in a world of screens – big screens, little screens, flat panel screens – flashing pictures displaced in space, time and context.

  Not even live theatre can escape from this backlit, mediated universe, thanks to Continuous City, produced by the Builders Association theatre company. (More …)

   

• Arts

  Poe’s dream within a dream awakes

  

  Posted by L.C. Willis at 1:30 am on June 13, 2009
  No Comments 4 images
  

  A distinct difference lies between emotional and intellectual reactions. The emotional, heart- and gut-wrenching visceral response can prompt tears in the absence of sadness, or laughter without being able to identify precisely what is humorous.

  Jonathan Christenson hopes to achieve such a response with his new play Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. He transports viewers into a dreamlike state, where the conscious and sub-conscious merge and there exists a blurred line between life and death, tragedy and comedy, experience and imagination. (More …)

   

• Arts

  Brault waxes on Breau

  

  Posted by Mike Crisolago at 12:00 am on June 13, 2009
  No Comments 1 image
  

  Pierre Brault’s one-man plays focus on characters with a dark side. The Canadian playwright/actor has tackled the trial and execution of assassin James Whelan, the schemes and suicide of art forger Elmyr de Hory and, most recently, the addictions and unsolved murder of legendary jazz guitarist Lenny Breau.

  So what does Brault, a master at depicting the tribulations and tragedies of his subjects, do in his spare time? Why, stand-up comedy of course. (More …)

   

• Arts

  It’s time for 5 O’Clock Bells

  

  Posted by Mike Crisolago at 11:41 pm on June 12, 2009
  No Comments 2 images
  

  There was a moment in the play 5 O’Clock Bells – during a transition between characters or after a particularly poignant line – when I sat back in my chair and thought to myself, “He’s done it.”

  “He” refers to Pierre Brault, the writer and sole cast member of the one-man play about the tormented life and tragic murder of jazz legend Lenny Breau. What he did, exactly, takes a minute to explain. (More …)

   

• Arts

  Media artist Tony Oursler brings boxes of memories to Luminato

  

  Posted by Russ Martin at 4:35 pm on June 11, 2009
  No Comments 5 images
  

  Tucked underneath the overhanging mass checkerboard of a building that is the Ontario College of Art and Design, is an ice-cream truck sized piece of temporary contemporary art. Technically two sculptures, Void or everything ever wanted, is one of three pieces created for Luminato by New York based multi-media and installation artist Tony Oursler. (More …)

   

• Arts

  Artist Tony Oursler opens strange windows on modern compulsions

  

  Posted by Stephen Humphrey at 12:49 pm on June 11, 2009
  1 Comment 4 images
  

  Media artist Tony Oursler tries naming all the video formats since he went to art school in the late 1970s.

  He describes unwieldy reel-to-reel things called Portapacks, assorted species of Beta, VHS, Hi8, laser disk, DVDs and now Blu-Ray. He thinks he might have missed a couple. (More …)

   

• Arts

  A crusade worth joining begins on Dufferin Street

  

  Posted by Mike Crisolago at 3:29 am on June 11, 2009
  5 Comments 1 image
  

  “A child has come to Paris, claiming he is illuminated.”

  So says a loyal servant to King Phillip of France. Little do they know, he isn’t the average 12-year-old boy. (More …)