Cirque de Soleil at Luminato: Death and the Uncanny??

Yes, I know “Death and the Uncanny” wasn’t the theme of the huge Luminato arts festival that just finished its third annual go-round in Toronto. But you must admit, there were a few shadows in certain corners. Like that reading from The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. And the evening of Gothic Fiction, with that surreal thing going on. And we can’t forget “Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre.” Oh, and the “Tales of the Uncanny” film screening.

Hm…rather a lot of corners, actually.

I didn’t get to many events myself, because I can only go to free stuff. But last Saturday, heading down to the lakeshore, I wandered into what turned out to be Luminato, for me.

Cirque de Soleil created a “weekend of wonder” for the closing days of the festival, down at the Music Garden along the lakeshore. It was indeed wonderful, but more than that, it was a manifestation of the Uncanny. With strong overtones of otherworldliness and death.

Think I’m nuts? What do you think that whiteface paint is really all about? There’s a long, long history behind the whiteface and the “clown” image in general, and it has always stemmed from a link to death.  And not just death, of course, but a sort of ritual departure from “normal” life, a step outside the rational. This image threatens us from the “other side,” attracting and repelling us at the deepest levels of our being. All the adult clown figures create this tension, this potential for uneasy ecstasy.

The very enclosures designed for these performances — spherical shapes of metal crossbars bolted together — served to set us apart from the world. Inside those spheres, open though they were, the normal rules were suspended as three whitefaced figures read books while suspended upside down on tipped-over chairs, or marched around with suitcases. One of them took a large metal hoop and began to spin it, eventually stepping into it and becoming part of the spinning.

Watch a gymnast do that at the Olympics, and you marvel at their skill. Put the same gymnast in whiteface, doing a similar routine with Cirque de Soleil, and that frisson of delicious unease goes through your vitals like a ghostly knife.

Music was another element of the otherworldliness, and of course, Cirque de Soleil is famous for this. Even between performances, the music floated around and through those spheres so you never quite came back to the real world while waiting for the next performers. And the long-coated clown with the crumpled top hat whirled nearby on the grass, cello swinging around and around with him, as he played his own eerie song.

At the edges of the space, a mechanical bird with brilliantly costumed rider strolled sedately by. It was really someone on stilts, using hidden controls to make the bird’s head and neck move. But it was almost impossible not to feel like the darn thing was real, as all the while, the distant, impassive white face of the rider seemed less of this world than the metal bird.

Which was how Sigmund Freud described the Uncanny, at least in part: discovering an inanimate object suddenly imbued with life. It’s not part of the natural. It is Other.

This, in my opinion, is the key to Cirque de Soleil’s success. People sit at the edges of the Other world, enthralled with the beauty of the Uncanny, attracted and repelled by the intoxicating danger of it all. And they survive.

And this was why I wandered into the Other world at the close of Luminato – and did not want to leave.

 

Doors Open Toronto and Toronto Transit

Up on stilts

If there’s one thing that stands out about employees at the Toronto Transit Commission’s heavy repair facility at the Greenwood Shop, it’s that they all love their jobs. I don’t mean “job satisfaction” or contentment or anything like that. We’re talking love, here.

This weekend is the tenth anniversary of Doors Open Toronto, in which significant buildings all over the city open doors to the public that are usually shut. And all the tours are free. I go every year, and usually I favour old, historic buildings, rather than something newer.

But when it comes to the TTC, I make an avid exception. Last year I missed the tour of the Lower Bay Street subway station that’s been closed for decades, so the Greenwood Shop was at the top of my list today.

It seems to be at the top of the list of the people who work there, too. It didn’t matter which shop you walked through — Vehicle Overhaul/Body Repair, Electrical and Electronic Repair, Truck/Axle/Gearbox/Rewheeling — everyone standing by to explain their section to onlookers was enthusiastic and interesting, knew their stuff — and loved being there. That was a universal theme with anyone I talked to, whether the Axle/Rewheeling guy who had been on the job for almost 29 years, or the young man in Pneumatic Repair who had been there only three.

Shiny!

They do a darn good job, and are justly proud. The Pneumatic guy explained the mechanism by which the air pumps work, to power the doors in streetcars or release the brakes in subway cars. Farther along the line, another man showed off his bright, shiny new paint job on a 15-year old car.

In another section, the Axle/Rewheeling guy spoke at considerable length about how they balance the wheels on those huge things. Did you know that there are something like 26 motors on a 6-car train, all of them controlling the wheels? And that, while those are great for pulling a train up a steep grade, there’s little you can do to reduce all that power when the train is flat and you really don’t need them all going at once? We learned what the millwrights do, and how there’s a “flat wheel monitor” that watches each train passing between Eglinton and Lawrence stations, producing graphs that let supervisors know if any of the cars need to get their wheels worked on.

We saw gearboxes and trucks and snow throwers and air pumps and couplers and breakers and nuts and bolts — it almost made you dizzy, this proliferation of mechanical and electronic gear! And right in the middle of it all, several men ran a gorgeous train set that featured miniature models of TTC streetcars from several eras. It was charming, and I coveted it mightily.

Touchy equipment!

Rows of yellow “Caution” tape guided us from shop to shop, while keeping us at a safe distance from all the equipment. But there were pieces of that equipment all along the other side of the tape, clearly labelled, with people to answer any questions we had. All the staff were friendly and helpful, and seemed just as pleased as punch to tell us about all the cool things they did. And all of us spectators were just as pleased to be there; I didn’t see one person who appeared bored.

Really, you just couldn’t be, in the midst of that dazzling display of craftsmanship and skill.

Considering that this was the first time the Greenwood Shop had done a Doors Open tour, it was a well-planned, very detailed, frankly spectacular success. If these people are even half as thorough and competent when they work on subway trains and streetcars, Torontonians have the safest system on the planet.

(For more photos, visit my Doors Open Toronto 2009 set at Flickr.)

 

Four mayors, little politics: no, this was not a dream

Four city mayors in the same room, with no politicking??

I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I may be exaggerating a bit: there were really only two mayors, one deputy mayor, and one former. And almost all they did was talk politics, but not in the usual “gotcha” sense. For a change, this was a genuine conversation, with very little sense that they were saying what they had to say just to get re-elected.

The occasion was the recent launch of former Toronto Mayor John Sewell’s new book, The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl, at another of Pages Books & Magazines’ This is Not a Reading Series events at the Gladstone Hotel. And in honour of the book, Sewell took part in a panel discussion with Mayors Rob Burton of Oakville and Steve Parish of Ajax, and Deputy Mayor Jack Heath of Markham, moderated by architect and urban designer Kim Story.

The evening provided an unusual chance to hear people at the top level of municipal government talking frankly about subjects like how to plan for water and sewage, how to manage population intensification, and what in the world to do about traffic. You felt less like you were listening to politicians and more like you were watching several intelligent people work away at some significant planning problems.

I swear I’ve never heard so much honest and thoughtful discussion from politicians in my entire life. These guys really think about these things. In fact, they worry about them. A lot.

And they were surprisingly critical of politicians doing things that we non-politicos think of as sheer manipulation for political gain. For example, Steve Parish spoke of the almost “incestuous” relationship between developers and politicians, which absolutely must be done away with. Rob Burton considers the urbanization of rural land to be a gigantic wealth-creation device. How do we discover who is behind these schemes? Burton says we merely need to ask, “Who got rich?” All the developers’ promises of low costs never produce cheaper houses; they just increase the profit margin for the developers.

Tough words from guys who we lay people tend to think of as being in bed with developers. Maybe we just didn’t have the “right” mayors in attendance that night.

Or maybe a shift is starting, as conscientious people take office and get a good look at what’s really been going on in these cities, with all the implications for a looming future. That became more and more evident, at least, when they got onto the subject of traffic and transit. In fact, everything kept coming back to that. With transit and roads all over Toronto and the satellite cities already stretched to full capacity, these mayors have to devise ways of increasing transit to prepare for the even greater population boom that’s now developing. It’s a subject constantly on their minds; everyone in the crowd could see that.

In the collegial and entertaining atmosphere, the only time any panelist got touchy was when some topics from Sewell’s book seemed too Toronto-centric. As Jack Heath reminded everyone, all 20 municipalities around the city are “also Torontonians.” Parish maintained that the real goal is to make a harmonious “Toronto region.” And in response to Sewell’s theory that the extra density in Toronto helps make people more courteous as people learn to live closely together, Burton remarked, “If density made you polite, nobody would ever complain about how they were treated in Paris.”

A panel discussion about sewage, population, and traffic — one of the best book-related evenings I’ve ever had? Yes, believe it or not. And do I want to read John Sewell’s book as a result? Certainly I do.

But even more, I’d like to spend another evening talking city planning with these guys.