Last night in Toronto was Nuit Blanche 2008, an All Night Art Event sponsored by the City and one major bank to showcase 155 different art projects throughout the downtown core and close-by area. This event is called Nuit Blanche (literally translated to White Night) as per the old French expression for not sleeping all night and the project lasts from 7pm on Saturday night until 7am on Sunday morning. This is the 3rd edition of Nuit Blanche and the first time that DR and I were in town for it, so we were pumped.

Our neighborhood, Cabbagetown, was participating this year for the first time so it was an easy starting point for us. After a couple of drinks, we stepped out to the magic… Well, it wasn’t too long before I realized that Nuit Blanche would quickly turned into Evening Blanche for me… Our very first stop was Carousel, a dance event with The Children’s Dance Theatre. My immediate thought was for how were they going to keep children dancing all night… seriously, children, dancing all night? Nope, that wasn’t good. I mean, the children’s dancing was but the idea wasn’t. So we quickly moved on to another event across the street, which was some author reading from someone’s porch to a bunch of empty chairs in the parking lot of the liquor store… NEXT!

We then walked up some more up Parliament St. to Project Beacon, which was not quite ready yet… It was a circle approximated 1 foot high and made out of branches, something like a giant nest, but according to the info we had it was supposed to be more like a 10 feet tall conic structure… To be honest, the artists looked like there were working hard at building their project… I suddenly realized why I was already so dissapointed, nothing was quite ready yet, maybe we were too early at just one hour passed the starting time. That was it for Cabbagetown, we skipped the other events, the gang was getting restless, we needed more WOW in our night, so we decided to go check the Ethereal Forrest of Church Street right smack in the middle of the gay village, that should be fun. Huh, computer says no! A couple of trees on this side of the street with a smoke machine:

another couple there with a stage announcing a dance performance 90 minutes later, another stage for aerial dancers with no performers… oh wait, there’s a crowd up the street, let’s go see… ah, OK, a performance, a couple dancing between trees, actually a bit effective, the best so far.

Shortly after the tree dancing finished, the aerial dancers stage started to buzz with some people running around so we made our way. Some chick came out and started to roll on the ground… huh? The sign says aerial dancer!!! With a crowd of 10 people deep, let me tell you, the rolling on the ground isn’t very effective if you happen to not be first in line… NEXT!!! To be fair, she did eventually started to climb up and moved to strange music while hanging in the air, but we were pretty much all ready to move on.

So we did, we moved south on Church to The Maple Leaf Gardens which was transformed for the night. It was a bit exciting to actually go inside as it has been closed for years since the hockey team moved to the Air Canada Centre. First reaction was how small the arena was, second reaction was more in the lines of Jesus Fuckin’ Christ, what the hell is this??? A New World was the name of the event but I really can’t tell you what was going on except that there was two screens showing films of what appeared to be milk seen through the eyes of a 4 year old blowing bubble in the glass with a straw… oh, and the bubbles talked, one side with a man’s voice, the other side with a woman’s voice… the sound being so full of bass, I couldn’t hear a word of what was going on, I motioned that I was having a heart attack and darted for the exit. Bubbling milk talking??? JFC…

Next on our list, which was truly top of mine for the night was Zombies In Condoland, the artist had invited anyone to dress up like a zombie to be part of a couple of scenes filmed by a pond behind a couple of condo developments. Great idea, well advertised too… way too advertised it seemed, the place was jammed pack, I’d approximate 2,500 people around this big pond and maybe 1 zombie for every 150 humans… poor lonely zombie:

That’s when I realized how many people were out for this night, it suddenly hit me how popular Nuit Blanche was/is/was going to be. And right away, instead of feeling dissapointed by the events, I became excited by the crowd…

Not too long after that, well after seeing another pond filled with over 1,000 plastic ducks:

after seeing an alleyway filled with pages from books stuck to the wall, after seeing dancing robots:

and their reflection on a nearby building, after seeing a guy in a 30 foot tall lifeguard type tower with a huge spotlight aiming his light at people in the crowd to give them their “15 seconds of fame”, we made our way to the Eaton Centre for Into The Blue, the extremely-large-lit-see-through-ice-cream-cone balloon… yeah, it was exactly as you can now imagine, actually here I am standing under it:

(The girl next to me is visualizing how my heart felt at the moment)

At last, we were next door to City Hall, where this was happening:
(In truly Nuit Blanche 2008 fashion, I stupidly filmed this sideways… )

This one event is happening all week, totally worth the visit if you’re in town in the evening, it was by far the best event of the night for us. Well, until we decided to go and get French Fries from one of the vendor and the two owners decided to have a fight in front of us… OOOOoooo how conceptual, how artisitic, how Nuit Blanche.

We were getting close to losing our Nuit Blanche patience but we thought we’d go check out Horridor at the Union Train Station described as this: “Horroridor” is a multi-channel dvd installation utilizing found footage from horror-thriller movies. The installation examines Hollywood’s construction of the reaction to the unknown. “Horroridor” strips away narrative to a non-articulated response of rage, pain and frustration, by isolating media recordings of men and women screaming to unknown forces that threaten existence. Ultimately the primal scream is showcased. Viewers will be guided toward a long corridor where they will pass through the approximately 20-foot dual projections of visual and audio recordings of hundreds of people screaming on either side of them.. But it wasn’t to be for us, the line up to get inside Horridor from here until tomorrow, it looked like it would take 2 nuit blanche to get through it… we bailed, we took the subway home. Nuit Blanche was over for us. (I since learned that the line up moved very very very fast and that is was THE best event of the night by some friends that did continue on after we left… it figures…)

After getting off the subway, we were walking home when we both suddenly heard a very loud drunk woman telling her boyfriend: “All I want to see is some goddamn zombies, that’s all I want to see”. Without hesitation, DR loudly replied for my pleasure: “Look in the mirror”. That became my best Nuit Blanche moment. Oh and also, getting my revenge on DR who was wearing his battery powered Wi-Fi detector t-shirt, very similar to the Equilizer t-shirt I wore on Pride weekend, and watching him get mauled by the crowds who wanted to touch it, to take pictures of it, to find out how it worked, if it really worked, etc… but then again, I think he looked like he didn’t mind it at all.

At the end of the day (or night to be correct), even if I felt a bit let down, I really liked Nuit Blanche, I know we missed out on so much, events that were truly two thousand times more interesting than the ones we got to see and I can’t wait to do it again next year, I’ll be more prepared and more rested for it… Bring it on Nuit Blanche.

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