So, Luminato now has not one but two Europeans trying to vault the festival into international ranks. British arts executive Anthony Sargent, appointed as chief executive of the Toronto multiarts festival this week, joins German artistic director Jorn Weisbrodt on the job and may prove just the boost Luminato needs: Europeans do know their arts festivals. Still, Sargent is going to have to perform the Euro hoist while balancing on the heads of Canadian artists and playing to a Toronto crowd. The man may be an administrative gymnast, but his assignment looks about as wobbly as this metaphor.
Let me offend many by starting off here: There are only two internationally recognized festivals in Canada and neither of them is Luminato. One is the Toronto International Film Festival; the other is the Montreal International Jazz Festival. When Toronto was at a particular low point in the 2000s, Luminato was conceived by business leaders as the kind of high-level, multiarts smorgasbord that would attract international cultural tourists while also providing enough free, fun and family events to entertain the city. It was planned without sufficient consultation with Canadian arts groups and has often felt like a top-down exercise, a perception that repeatedly hiring Europeans will only reinforce.
TIFF has earned its reputation both as a Hollywood industry gathering and as the film fest that admits the hoi polloi in their low-heeled shoes, but the truth is that pleasing both the cognoscenti and the general population is a tough trick that Luminato is still trying to master.
Since its inception in 2007, the festival has worked hard to earn its credentials on the international arts scene by commissioning lavish world premieres from big-name artists: It can keep telling the globe's itinerant culturati that Marina Abramovic or David Byrne will be in Toronto this year with new work. Of course, there is already an enthusiastic audience for this kind of art amongst Torontonians. For years they packed sold-out shows of leading international theatre troupes at Harbourfront Centre's World Stage festival (before it turned into a drawn-out series). But in Toronto that plugged-in audience isn't large enough to justify the kind of large-scale commissions on which Luminato is staking its reputation. World Stage was often a festival of work that had already been seen in Edinburgh or Avignon, and Luminato seemingly wants to be Edinburgh or Avignon.
Millions more people live within relatively easy reach of those cities, pretty places where Europeans will happily travel for a weekend, than live within easy reach of Toronto. Luminato might realistically bring in more Americans, who abandoned this city after megamusicals got tired, New York got cleaner and Toronto got SARS. To date, however, the festival has mainly attracted people from the GTA – which, given the geography, is rather what you would expect. You often hear enthusiastic talk in the arts community about the Sydney Festival, but the truth is that the international event mainly draws Australians. In short, there's no easy match between what Luminato needs to do for its reputation and what it needs to do for its box office.
Caught in that squeeze, the festival seeks a distinctive personality, a sense that is not just an Edinburgh or Sydney wannabe, a drive that suggests it has artistic focus and cultural roots – and surely that personality would lie in the way Luminato might showcase Canadian artists in an international context.
You can see some version of that thinking at work in Weisbrodt's programming for 2015. After reviving the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach in 2012, the festival is now staging a 1,000-performer production of Apocalypsis, a giant 1980 work by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer that would never be revived without a Luminato-sized budget behind it. And the Polish experimental music curators at Unsound Productions will be staging a two-night mini-festival in the Port Lands' unused Hearn Generating Station, thereby animating an intriguing Toronto space and providing an interesting example of a global-local encounter. Similarly, as an antidote to all the gigantic stuff, the festival is also offering Seven Monologues, a series of small-scale shows by a varied list of artists from Britain, France, Canada, Brazil and Argentina, including Toronto playwright Daniel McIvor and visual artist Shary Boyle.
International festival with a sharp Canadian edge? As always, the proof will be in June's pudding.
Kate Taylor