For the month of June, Luminato 2019 will host over 165 Canadian and international artists, stage seven world premieres, two North American premieres, five original Luminato commissions and 88 performances in 14 venues across Toronto. Recognized as Toronto’s international festival of arts and ideas, Luminato is dedicated to presenting an annual festival that cuts across traditional art form boundaries.
Luminato is known for presenting inventive and unusual performances and installations that reflect diverse voices and opinions. The Full Light of Day, a new play that opened the festival at the Bluma Appel Theatre, exemplifies the inventiveness of the festival with its real time video projections of the actors onto the staging, drawing the audience into a totally immersive experience.
The Full Light of Day revolves around Mary (Canadian actor Gabrielle Rose), the aging matriarch of a wealthy Canadian family. At the end of her life, Mary refuses to continue to turn a blind eye towards the misdeeds that helped her family amass great wealth. The play, from award-winning artists Daniel Brooks and Kim Collier, is a master class in set design and Gabrielle Rose is fantastic in her role. The Full Light of Day is an Electric Company Theatre production in association with The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, co-presented by Luminato and Canadian Stage. The show runs until Thursday, June 13; it is two hours and forty minutes long with one intermission.
Our Luminato 2019 Recommendations!
BIZIINDAN!
Womex Professional Excellence Award recipient and visionary, ShoShona Kish, hosts BIZIINDAN! a concert featuring Canada’s most well respected Indigenous artists and activists, culminating in a newly-commissioned tribute to the ‘trailblazer of truth,’ Willie Dunn. Dunn, a Mi’kmaq and Scottish award-winning singer/songwriter, filmmaker and activist, was a pioneer of protest ballads and an advocate for Indigenous rights. BIZIINDAN! features 2010 Juno Award winning band Digging Roots, 2018 Polaris Music Prize-winner Jeremy Dutcher, 2017 Polaris Music Prize-winner Lido Pimienta, singer/songwriter Marie Gaudet and award winning legendary artist Pura Fe. The concert will conclude with a screening of Canada’s first music video, The Battle of Crowfoot (1968, National Film Board), created by Dunn. This event is one night only – Friday, June 14.
Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)
An exhilarating musical tribute to revolutionary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, featuring Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman. Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) explores Mapplethorpe’s uncanny ability to make his viewers question their commonly held beliefs on race, gender, sexuality and politics. Using large-scale projections of some of Mapplethorpe’s famously edgy photographs, with original music by Bryce Dessner (of Grammy Award-winning band The National), poetry by Patti Smith, Korde Arrington Tuttle and Essex Hemphill and the voices of Grammy Award winning eight-person choral ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Triptych is a bold multidimensional examination of one of the most brilliant and provocative visual minds of the 20th century. This event is one night only – Saturday, June 22.
The Cave
From celebrated Canadian artists John Millard (composer), Tomson Highway (lyricist) and Martha Ross (book), comes The Cave, an intimate and urgent response to our changing environment. As a forest fire rages all around destroying everything in its path, the forest’s animals escape to the safety of The Cave. As they wait for the fire to subside, tensions grow and the animals become keenly aware of how centuries of human activity have led to this moment and to the obliteration of their homes. Told from the perspective of the innocents, this powerful new cabaret is a gripping take on the effects of climate change. The Cave runs from June 18 – 23. The performance is just over one hour long with no intermission.
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Luminato 2019 – June 7 to 23. For a full schedule of festival programming including free events please visit the following link: https://luminatofestival.com/2019/Events
About Luminato
Luminato is Toronto’s international festival of arts and ideas dedicated to presenting programming that cuts across traditional art form boundaries. Luminato works closely with Canadian artists to support the development and creation of distinctive new work, as well as presenting today’s most exciting artists from around the world. Luminato is a charitable, not-for-profit, globally-connected cultural organization proudly based in Toronto on the territories of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and most recently Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
