WINTER CITY 2010: FIRE & FROSTBITE

This weekend Collette and I attended this year's version of Toronto Winter City, our annual winter festival. Most of the festivities took place at Nathan Phillip Square and consisted of a fire installation, an arial troupe from France and, for some reason, a Caribana exhibition. Fire, calypso, partially clothed young ladies dancing to steel drums .. yup, sounds like a good way to warm up a winter night. And cold it was. With the wind -20 C. We were dressed for it, parka's, snow pants, gloves, toques, boots ... yeh nothing says sexy like two people properly dressed for winter. But hey, it's winter in Ontario, what you going to do?

There was an installation called Angels of the Apocalypse that was quite popular. The fact that it involved these giant steel sculptures that breathed fire .. nice, hot, lambent fire .. may have had something to do with it.

The installation consisted of about of dozen of these giant pieces, I'm not really quite sure what they were meant to be, dragon scales maybe, but they reminded me of fangs. I think the whole thing was indeed supposed to represent a dragon. Besides the scales or spines, there was a head, complete with baleful eyes fuelled by burning wood.

Another part of the dragon (or whatever it was) was a big, gently arching metal sculpture, perhaps the body, that kids were encouraged to climb on to, crawl under, and hit with hammers so that the metal would ring. The body was covered with metal levers that reminded me of leaves and when pressed, they would cause fire to spout up through the steel scales. Nothing like a little audience participation.

Some of the other heat came in the form of some Caribana masque performers. I'm not quite sure I get the connection between winter and calypso but this is multi cultural Toronto after all, so you never know what is going to pop up, arts and culture wise.

There was a calypso band, dancers and a king and queen in the elaborate, gilded, over the top Caribana costumes.

True Canadian spirit was shown by the female dancers; yes they had sweaters and mittens and some heavy duty looking hose but still .. it was minus freaking 20 degrees ... and the queen in her costume showed true northern fortitude by forgoing the sweater and mittens. This is, to be sure, northern Jamaican.

The main performance of the evening was an arial show by the French troupe Compagnie Les Passagers. Their show was called Cosmogonia which, according to their press, was based on the book of Genesis. Perhaps. There was definitely a story to the show, how it relates to the Bible I'm not sure, but it was certainly entertaining.

The show consisted of 12 little scenes, held together by the presence of a male and female clown. She may have been God (our deity as a clown, ok, I'll be kind and leave it at that) or certainly Eve and I guess he was Adam. In between were a variety of struggles they must overcome to finally find each other.

The show took place on this gigantic billboard, it had to be a good 60 ft tall, and all the dancers were on wires. Images were projected on the back drop, some still, some motion video and with the powerful trance music, added to the scene and helped you forget you were standing in front of City Hall in the frigid cold.

As you'll see in the video (you knew there was a video, right?) the whole thing works. I loved the music, I loved the backdrop, and the skill of the dancers was evident. Particularly memorable was a pair of female dancers who moved around this huge billboard with a speed and grace that really gave you the impression of flying.

The video is a bit long, I edited the show down a fair bit, it originally ran to around 40 minutes. We enjoyed it very much and although the fingers on my cam controls kind of lost most of their feeling, I really did forget the cold winter weather and was transported to a different place.

And, the show ended with a wedding. Even on a day off, I'm shooting a wedding.

So here's the video, the fire show, the caribean dancers and the aerial show. Hope you enjoy. And bear in mind, this video was powered by video tape and frostbite.

Toronto Winter City Festival 2010 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.