Once More With Feeling, Nuit Blanche

THis one-night event featured ten new or selected works, together with another five from Open Call, as part of the City of Toronto's Nuit Blanche city-wide all-night programme.

Once More With Feeling explored the desire to repeat and remake through a series of site-based video, performance, sound and sculptural works. Playing between past and present, the programme aimed to evoke circuits of renewal as well as movements of revolt. Many works in the exhibition literally revolved, enacting loops of repetition and feedback, haunting and hallucination. Many of works used the medium of sound. The zone explored how - with its power to unleash the energies of the crowd - music and the voice can be thresholds between the social and the individual. Listening to a song, we find it hard not to sing along, drawing the tune into our bodies and making it our own, the event speculated. Some artworks played on the durational aspect of Nuit Blanche, citing its 12 hour structure and pointing to the struggle against time that it stages. Other works create a sense of time ‘outside’ time, of communal experience and sensory exhilaration. Finding poetry in the everyday, artists transformed an office façade into a stage for vertiginous dance (Trisha Brown Dance Company), and photocopiers into disco lights (Simon Denny & Yngve Holen). They also embraced the potential of mistakes to rupture familiar formats and to create new forms (Maeve Brennan and Ruth Ewan). Approaching the Mayan prophesied ‘end of days’ on December 21, 2012, the exhibition contrasted scenes of doomsday panic and destruction (Dave Dyment) with cycles of regeneration (Susan Stenger).

Commissioned artists were Maeve Brennan & Ruth Ewan, Trisha Brown Dance Company (Planes, 1968, soundtrack by Simone Forti), Brian Cauley, Simon Denny & Yngve Holen
Dave Dyment, Hadley+Maxwell, Oliver Husain, Katie Paterson, Susan Stenger, JD Walsh.

Works selected from Open Call were by Kirtan Collective, Emergency Exit, Julian Higuerey Núñez & Henry Adam Svec, William Robinson, Varun Vachhar.