Lumiere 2007 illumination and inspiration

Well, last weekend I had the opportunity to participant in the Lumiere Festival, which is probably the most majestic event I have ever seen in Ottawa. As I described earlier in my blog, I made a series of lanterns for the festival based on the Platonic Solids and the Classical Elements. I also appeared as my performance character Mizster Cubeball, minus the makeup (Mizster Cubeball doesn't like to show his face unless he is explicitly invited to go somewhere).

So, after setting up my lanterns, I joined the rallying players in the streets to begin the parade march. At first, I was kind of playing on the side lines during the parade since I wasn't really invited to march in the parade. But then I told myself, what the heck, there's a marching Samba band and I have batons, so it's time to play drum major, so I got right up in front of Samba Ottawa and did my marching thing. One of my more long-term goals as a performer is to lead a circus marching band, so that was a bit of a glory moment for me, although I didn't "have the balls" to stay up there the whole time, considering the situation.

After that, I got to see a couple of great performances. There was a really cute Indonesian shadow pupet show. I also met up for a second time with Christiane Claude the mime, who I had spoken with earlier, and helped her rouse a crowd for her show. The performance was a thematic re-enactment of the birth-death-rebirth cycle, and I found it inspiring.

An aside about miming: when doing peformance in the streets during Bluesfest, someone asked me if I was a mime once, and I had never considered that I kind of look like a mime with my chekery shirts and black and white facepaint. So, I ended up improvising getting stuck in a box, eventually turning the sides inside out to form a box outside of me. I don't think I could be a traditional mime because I really like to make sound, but I'm considering encorporating elements of mime into my act, maybe taking a different spin and becoming a "rhyming mime" of sorts. "Hey ! Somebody help me out of this box ! It's got no door nor locks. Until someone helps me out, I'm going to scream and shout."

One last thing I would like to note is the Earthrise performance group, who were helping to raise awareness about the delecate weave of the web of life. They had this really neat "earth drum" which consited of a very wide short cylinder, having a transparent top, and a bottom with an earth painted on it and mung beans inside, such that when you tilted it side to side, it made the sound of the ocean. The also had a beautiful giant turtle sculpture with the world on it's back. I helped to clean up the earth by pulling out my "head cleaner" (a feather duster) and giving it's back a sweep. The turtle has become an important symbol to me because of it's connection with the Lo Shu Square, which formed the basis for the trigrams of the I Ching.

Anyway, after I saw those performances, I did a lot of wandering around and had a little bit of magical adventure. I got blasted by magic ball of light by the mage and sprinkled with magic farie dust when I encountered the Mini Circque duo. I walked the glowing labrynth and shined my light in the middle. And in all of my wanderings, I got to do lots of play with my roley poles.

To be completely honest, I found myself quite disoriented amongst it all. After the festival was over, I discovered there were a bunch of performers that I would have really liked to see (a full list is on the website), but I had no way of knowing what was going on. Two things that I wished I would not have missed for the sake of inspiration were the fortune teller, because I am interested in doing I Ching divinations as part of my act, and secondly, there was a world-class magician, Michael Bourada, and I am also learning to do magic tricks (luckily I got invited to a magic circle by another magician I met). Oh, that reminds me, if you're interested in giving me an opportunity to practice either form of magic, let me know, and I'll give you a show.

So, as much as I loved the festival, my biggest constructive criticism of it is that there was no orientation to it. I realize that this bias is partly due to the fact that I tend to get lost. Still, I think I would like to help bring some more order to the festival for next year, because I'm sure there's others like me out there. I had some ideas on how to help conduct the masses (if they so chose)

• have a board with a map and schedule of performances
  
• after the parade, host a guided tour of the grounds, where the lantern makers and performers could give an introduction to their presence and the festival
• create "performances circuits", whereby each performance could end by suggesting a next performance for the audience to attend (might want several circuits, giving the audience several choices for direction)

I am also intersted in getting sponsored to build a larger version of the "Platonic Elements Light-Mobil" , and possibly give some sort of performance and/or do I Ching divinations. And maybe next year, I can be the official drum major of the parade. Yep, it's really my kind of celebration !