A WHITE NIGHT BEFORE A GOD’S TWILIGHT

When I saw Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth, ten years ago, I had spent the night previous up all night with a rowdy crowd of German youth associated with my host, the supertitles guy at the Nürnberg opera. Well, I think I did get a few hours’ sleep, eventually, on the floor of this house under construction where they were squatting. It didn’t make sitting on those uncomfortable Bayreuth seats any easier, although the performance remains fixed in my memory for many musical reasons (visually/dramatically it was pretty stupid). Götterdämmerung this afternoon will have been preceeded (it’s 8 am as I type this) by a similarly wakeful night--Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn?--at Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s first ever “free all-night contemporary art thing” (that’s how it’s billed--the ancient Icelandic parliament used to be called the "Thing"), based on similar civic celebrations--first in Paris four years ago, then in Brussels, Rome, Riga, Montréal, Madrid, and now Toronto.

What is it? 130 installations of all kinds of art, most of it contemporary, most of it kind of weird and challenging for stodgy old opera-goers like me, in every corner of a city, open to the public from 7 pm last night to 7 am this morning. Go to www.livewithculture.ca for more details. Whatever it was, it was a happening, and I’m thrilled that I happened to be here to witness it--even if it means I’ll need more than the usual amount of coffee today at Götterdämmerung!

My own Nuit Blanche experience is easily summed up, since I’m much older than I was ten years ago (far more than ten years older) and can’t really do the all-nighters anymore. I was out till 1 or 2 something, and then got up again at 6 to see things getting wrapped up and watch the sun come up over Toronto’s weird and wonderful Town Hall. Among the exhibits I got to see were the Art Gallery of Ontario open to the public, with a special collection centering around civic issues including some really fascinating 20th century Canadian paintings; OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design, open to the public, with exhibits of work (mostly multimedia) by alumni. The public, I should mention, was all of Toronto’s most tragically hip: they wore uniforms of jeans and hoodies with corduroy blazers, and many were as scruffy as I. The exhibition out on Queen St. “Position Yourself in a Network of Possibilities”, basically a 70s disco dance floor created out on a busy sidewalk, attracted bouncy high schoolers all night long (although it looked like the adults stayed away in droves); “In Pursuit of Happiness” was a large installation featuring two actors and lots of plastic, taking up most of a boulevard median. I didn’t think it’d be worth it to wait in line for hours to get into to Darren O’Donnell’s “Ballroom Dancing”, which seemed to be a middle-school dance, with lots of inflatables, to which adults were invited.

I was interested, however, by Adrian Blackwell’s “Model for a Public Space (speaker)”, a round spiralling bleacher around a central performance space, and beneath a tarp, would have made Richard Wagner’s eyes pop out. (Blackwell defines himself as an anarchist in terms of social hierarchy--he objects to the cultural forces that try to push all artists to greater and greater heights of individuality and celebrity, since that makes collaborative art kind of weird. True! But what are you gonna do? Here we are, across the street, putting on in the Ring perhaps Toronto’s biggest ever collaborative art endeavor--and one artist, Mr. Wagner, at the center of it all. Since this opera company has no General Director but rather a Music Director, the conductor Richard Bradshaw, it’s no accident that there’s no one stage director for the Ring--too much power in one person’s hands! Wagner himself would have had a flurry of contradictory opinions about the questions Blackwell asks, as do education personnel at opera companies worldwide.

Perhaps the most interesting piece was “Roy and Silo’s Gay Divorce, 2006”, a public swimming pool done up with a looping ‘video operetta’, in six chapters viewed in six different spaces, with lots of balloon penguins floating in the pool and all sorts of stuff with frisbees and Penguin books. When I went back past there this morning, it was all roped off by the fire department, so I hope nothing untoward happened. I can barely begin to describe this ‘piece’, except to say it was a typically witty, fractured gay take on questions of marriage, community, homelessness, literature, public order, nature, and lots of other stuff, featuring a naked copywright lawyer singing and showering backwards and two penguins crooning a weird German duet-rewrite of Isolde’s Liebestod, with a very freely translated set of titles. I guess you can do that.