An illuminating spectacle

The highly impressive LuminaTO festival in Toronto jumped out of nowhere straight to the top of its game, thanks to imagination and some realistic funding, writes Deirdre Falvey.

HOW'S THIS FOR a good-news story? Just a few years ago, the city of Toronto decided to grow a festival from scratch. But rather than starting small and growing organically, which is the model most festivals in Ireland, for example, have followed, Toronto thought big and ambitious, and it was born fully-formed, a large, multi-disciplined, international, big budget arts festival which hit the ground running.

The second annual LuminaTO in gorgeous Toronto has just finished, and there were a number of striking features about it. It had a raft of top class, high end international work, from Mark Morris's Mozart Dancesto Gregory Burke's Blackwatch, to RSC's amazingly staged Indian and Sri Lankan multi-lingual Midsummer Night's Dreamto US composer Mikel Rouse's unusual Denis Clevelandtrilogy looking at popular culture, to Joni Mitchell's Green Flag Song. These are shows that are on the touring circuit, so to speak, of international festivals - Joni Mitchell's visual art show, a response to human strife and fear, for example, is heading to the Galway Arts Festival next month; and a smaller Mikel Rouse's show was there a couple of years ago.

But aside from the fancy ticketed international stuff, most of the events were free, and there were tons of them, with more than a million people attending over the festival - over the opening weekend, when I visited, there was a big opening party on the central Yonge-Dundas Square, all dickied up with a "ceiling" of large inflatable balloon-like installations that pulsated with colour in reaction to noise. The headliners were the Count Basie Orchestra and a Canadian jazz prodigy Nikko Yanofsky, with a voice that was altogether more mature than her 14 years. The opening six days was packed with free dance classes (tango, square-dance, swing, latin, disco, bollywood) followed by open-air performances in the appropriate style.

And the closing weekend had a two-centred approach for what they called a water carnival, with music and outdoor entertainment for the masses, and a foodie festival, in the excellent Harbourfront Centre and in the old Distillery district, an enclave of shi-shi shops and restaurants and plazas in a renovated distillery just outside the centre of town. But as well as that there were street celebrations, a funk festival, and Streetscape, a public visual art programme which included an interactive installation by NY artist Jesse Bransford and a community mentorship project with young people in project housing, involving photography, video and performance, as well as collaboration on a film by sculptor Richard Herring.

Toronto's Mille Femmesby French artist Pierre Maraval created a "human landscape" of 1,000 photographic portraits of women involved in the arts in Toronto; at the closing press conference last week, chief executive Janice Price said the installation was being extended, such was the public response. Among the Canadian work on show I caught Where The Blood Mixes, by young playwright Kevin Loring, co-commissioned by LuminaTO and Vancouver's Playhouse Theatre. It was a strong and moving story about a native American man being re-united with the daughter he lost to social services as a child, but still dealing with his own childhood in an abusive institution.

Other things thrown into the mix was Silent Danceparty on Yonge-Dundas Square, where people downloaded a specially mixed dance-set onto their iPods, pressed play at the same moment, and shared the vibe in silence. Slow Dancing, on the other hand, had dancers from around the world in hyper-slow-motion on a large screen in the dark of the grounds of the University of Toronto, the Oxbridge-style campus. Choreographer William Forsythe, too, had public video installations, and British composer Nitin Sawhney and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed his new score for the 1929 silent Indian film A Throw of the Dice.

While it's a challenge to make an impact in a city with a population (in its greater area) of roughly five million, and while undoubtedly some feathers must be ruffled (and certainly some of those programming non-festival arts events around festival time must have faced ticket-sales challenges), LuminaTo is pretty impressive, in its scope, in the standard and volume of its activities, and in its inclusivity.

The budget for all this was Canadian $12 million (€7.6 million) this year. That figure would make any of the top Irish festivals weep with envy. The Dublin Theatre Festival, for example, last year celebrating its 50th anniversary, had a bigger budget than usual, €3.9m, compared to €3.2m this year. And the Galway Arts Festival is producing this year's festival for €2.2m, which surely makes Irish festivals formidable loaves and fishes operations which give a big bang for their buck.

THE GENESIS OF this fully formed festival is, hearteningly, one of civic spirit and philanthropy, later shored up by government support. In 2003, when Canada was down, post-Sars, two well-connected businessmen in Toronto were independently looking for a way to pick the city up and make it feel good about itself again. Tony Gagliano, who runs a big publishing company, St Joseph Communications, was inspired by the cultural buildings being built in Toronto and saw an opportunity to cast the city in a new light.

Quite separately, David Pecaut, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and chairman of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, saw that the arts were a powerful way to engage the immigrant cultures converging in Toronto in city-building.

Apparently both men were teasing out notions of how a festival might rejuvenate the city they loved, and the transformative power of the arts, and how the culture sector could drive tourism and economic prosperity, and, the story goes, it was suggested by various people that they meet. So Roberto Martella invited the two men to lunch at his Italian restaurant, Grano (a cluttered, characterful, place almost at odds with much of Toronto's shiny newness) and there the idea was born over calamari and wine.

The duo met Toronto's arts leaders - the city has many large cultural institutions and arts organisations - to build on the notion and get their ideas, and then set up an advisory committee drawn from those organisations, many of whom became producing partners with the festival. With an aim to celebrate creativity, the three crucial anchors for the programming were set out as accessibility, collaboration and diversity.

Janice Price, originally from Toronto and then running the Kimmel Centre in Philadelphia, was recruited as CEO, and the festival was announced in July 2006, with the inaugural one starting in June 2007 with 100 events. It's Price who is the public face of the festival on brochures, and no one is listed as artistic director; the vice president of programming - effectively artistic director - is Chris Lorway, who has an impressive background in international arts.

Tony Gagliano recalls that "so many people immediately embraced the importance of the initiative even though, early on, there was nothing but a vision. David and I visited literally hundreds of community leaders, senior executives, government leaders, and members of the artistic community to share the idea with them and to ask for their ideas and support. This is where so many people really stepped up and supported Luminato and this is when we found what we now call our 'founding luminaries'."

These, nearly 30 founding patrons of the festival - private individuals or families, and a few corporations - each put $100,000 (€63,440) into the vision at the beginning to kick-start it. There are now 43 of these "luminaries". With this sort of backing, the Ontario government came on board in late 2005 with $1 million (€634,400) in seed funding. And more financial support flowed: among the range of government funding was a one-off $15 million (€9.5 million) grant this April for future programming, which gives the festival sustainability, and the confidence to plan ahead. "Government support is predicated on community support," says Gagliano.

AND THEN THERE'S corporate funding - L'Oreal is what they call a presenting sponsor ("LuminaTO and L'Oreal, Partners in Creativity", with the make-up company's logo half the size of the festival's, and a presence, most visibly in a tented area in Yonge-Dundas square, offering make-overs for which a queue crawled from the entrance). Lots of individual events have separate sponsors too, and the corporate feel is pretty tangible. There are dangers in depending on high levels of corporate support, especially thinking of the demise of the former Du Maurier World Stages, Toronto's international theatre festival which bit the dust after its title sponsors withdrew (when tobacco sponsorship was outlawed); luckily, 30% of LuminaTO's budget is sponsorhip.

What all this means is that the festival has a $12 million (€7.6 million) annual budget to play with, which allows it amazing latitude to bring top international work to the city, support local companies, and collaborate with artists to create new work. The massive civic philanthropy, government support and corporate backing is staggering, and sobering when compared to Ireland. And while clearly Toronto has a lot of wealth, Ireland has plenty of very rich people, not all of whom give something back - or even pay their taxes here. Lessons and food for thought abound.