Crowds light up at arts festival’s final curtain
Filed Under Curtain Rods | Posted on June 16, 2008
Lumina TWO, as the staff has been known to call it, is in the books and a successful second effort by most accounts.
But before the stages came down, the festival offered a final weekend of revelry that drew tens of thousands to two very different celebrations at the Distillery District and Harbourfront Centre.
Luminat’eau: Carnival H2O was a lakeside multicultural hub, complete with a world café, an international market and an extensive and varied lineup of music and dance. Organizers at times pressed too hard to impose the liquid theme on perfectly ordinary events, but it didn’t detract from the entertainment.
On Friday and Saturday, sizable crowds meandered through a large performance tent and encircled the Natrel Pond for a variety of acts. By the time calypso singer David Rudder took to the stage in the twilight of Saturday evening, there was hardly space to walk the promenade that wraps around Harbourfront’s amphitheatre. Two hours later, reggae giant Junior Reid electrified a massive crowd that danced, cheered and flooded the night air with a pungently herbal aroma.
The main stage, largely ignored during the day, drew hundreds to evening acts ranging from the quirky classical Quarteto Gelato to soul singer Divine Brown, as colourful projections danced on the brick fa?ades of Trinity Square.
An informal sample of festival patrons suggests they were impressed with Luminato’s growth since last year, the most common complaint being that the program was too scattered and sprawling, lacking recognizable threads to make sense of the 100-plus events.
Some grumbled about a perceived dearth of top-end talent, perhaps unfairly given that it attracted major international players such as the Mark Morris Dance Group and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch. But it may be telling that Leonard Cohen performed midweek mere metres away and chose not to grace the festival lineup.
Tags: acts, ades, amp, black watch, cog, curta, curtain, david rudder, distillery district, divine brown, festival patrons, final curtain, harbourfront centre, herbal aroma, mark morris dance, mark morris dance group, massive crowd, morris dance group, patrons, performance tent, quartet, quarteto gelato, revelry, second effort, soul singer, trinity square, turdRelated posts
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