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That's entertainment! Isn't it?
It happens all the time. You tell your friends about a cool new bar that you happened on one night. They excitedly decide to join you next time. After all the hype, expectations are high. Turns out a whole bunch of people had the same idea. After all the talk and the new found popularity, it is bound to be a disappointment.
Friends, let me introduce you to Nuit Blanche 2007.
Last year, Nuit Blanche was the new kid on the block that barely hit the Toronto arts and entertainment radar before the night of the actual event. Given the suckiness of the weather, a cold and rainy dark night, it was a great surprise to everyone that over 400,000 people showed up.
This year was almost the opposite. Talk of Nuit Blanche began way back in June. There was much promise for expansion of activities and the “zones” as institutions like Ryerson and George Brown jumped on the bandwagon. The weather was amazing. Perfect for a full night of random wandering.
I think by now, everyone has heard of the huge number of people that were in attendance this year. And everyone has probably heard the grumbling about the crowds, the inefficiencies with public transit and the unenthusiastic reports of the events.
I think for those of us who were delighted by last year. There was no way that the second year could have the same random, uncontrived quality to it.
Also, the audience of people in attendance this year were probably a halfway mix between those who are engaged in the arts most of the time, who craved Nuit Blanche to be different than your run-of-the-mill art gallery opening or overly-branded street festival and those who are not as familiar with contemporary performance art/installations who, unaware that their participation and observation is as much part of the event as anything they are looking at, were wandering around town waiting to be entertained.
The event, in all its vastness and ephemera, was simultaneously both those things and neither of them.
I participated in Nuit Blanche in a collaborative project at George Brown College . While it was a great thing for GBC to step into the fray and launch its 40th anniversary celebrations on that night – it was slightly disappointing to see how little the College seemed to understand the concept of the night, and the events there – at least during the first few hours, seemed no more than any other institutional “open house”. It is understandable that this kind of interpretation of a heavily corporate-sponsored event would happen, especially as the Nuit Blanche organizers attempt to expand the territory for it. But the unique concept of Nuit Blanche that distinguishes it from just another street festival is the idea of the “sleepless night” and the aesthetic for the night should match the surrealism that one experiences in such a state. The performance or “play” of the evening should be just that – a play. Not a display or demonstration. And fluorescent, institutional overhead lights should be banned!
Some of the favourite things I experienced that night, of the little I saw, were those that allowed me to play the voyeur: the unpacked apartment on the corner of Cecil and Beverly where I watched a group of people hanging out in the “kitchen” while I picked through items from the tenant's shelves, the Mille Chen installation on D'Arcy Street that was simply a number of houses with shadows in the window acting out stories from her childhood, and the eerie wallpaper patterns that lit up the windows of the George Brown house on Beverly Street.
This year's Nuit Blanche might have been a disappointment for some people who expected the whimsy of last year to begat a greater sense of the spectacular this year. But it could be simply a case of growing pains: for the organization, for the city and for an increasingly culturally engaged population of the GTA. And in spite of the ho-hummedness of the detractors of this year's night, everyone seems to have had something, if only one thing, positive to say about the night. Everyone took away something. Either from the official selections or those random acts that happened around and throughout the night, be it a t-shirt or a funny conversation in an alley.
I look forward to seeing what happens next year.