Winter City Festival 2010

I dropped by the Winter City Festival at Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday. I believe it's an annual event they have here every winter in Toronto. They're probably trying to do something to take our minds off the normally long, harsh winters we have here in the city. Surprisingly, this year it hasn't been too bad overall. Though the past few days have been absolutely frigid, comparatively speaking anyway.

The festivities started at around 6:00 p.m. Originally I had arrived earlier. So to avoid the chill I headed to the Indigo bookstore at the Eaton Centre to kill some time. I found a relationship book my friend Cortina recommended to me - The 5 Love Languages, by Gary Chapman. It's actually not too bad. There are some useful tidbits of information people should take note of. Really.

When I got back to Nathan Phillips Square, the music and coloured lights had started. There was an installation set up by the Flaming Lotus Girls out of San Francisco called Angel of the Apocalypse. The above photos is from it. Though I don't know if the girl in the hot, pink coat was part of it, or if she was just an enthusiastic audience member. They had built large metal sculptures that pretty much breathed fire. It was pretty popular with the spectators. I'm not sure if it was because of the visual appeal or because they just wanted to keep from turning in to human popsicles.

There were other performers as well. People on trapeze swings, hanging from ropes and long pieces of fabric doing all manner of spins and tricks. Others were juggling fire or twirling it on various implements. The main attraction was a group from France called Compagnie Les Passagers. Over the course of Winter City they will be involved in three different aerial performances which combine theatre, dance and acrobatics set to music on a constantly changing, massive, vertical stage. The one they did this evening was called Cosmogonia. In a succession of twelve scenes they recounted the book of Genesis in the bible. It was quite fun. I don't know how they managed to do it in the bitter cold. Kudos to them. All I know is my skinny, little fingers were frozen to the bone and both of my Canon lithium ion batteries died a slow, miserable death. Luckily for me it was just after the performance was over. So we both got to go home and recharge.

View the entire slideshow on Flickr.com