Last night, I had my first live-blogging experience as my star photographer friend Ayngelina and I tried to faithfully record the weird and wonderful things we saw throughout the night at Nuit Blanche: http://torontoist.com/2009/10/blanche_slate_nuit_blanche_live.php. A note to anyone trying to do this in the future, you cannot count on free wifi, or even paid services like Boingo. I ended up texting my editor instead.
Not only did my editor, David Topping, put together the post on the site as the night unfolded, but pieces of it were also projected on a big, blank outer wall of the AGO. We got there at about 1AM. My friends patiently waited as I stood poised with my camera, waiting for one of mine to come up.
Nuit Blanche always sounds really good on paper, but more times than not, the execution lacks something. "Dance of the Cranes," a piece where construction cranes were supposed to move in tandem to music was just two cranes with monotone blue Christmas lights spinning slowly on their axes. And the "Wild Ride," which was two midway rides located in the middle of the Financial District and staffed by carnies in suits to represent the "wild ride" workers in banking have had this year, didn't put any emphasis on the dressed up operators and just looked like a regular carnival ride with hordes of people waiting to get on.
I think the coolest thing was the "plane" that flew across the ceiling inside the 24 hour grocery store in Liberty Village. People are shopping, everything is as usual, then the sound of a jumbo jet fills the store and the immense shadow of a plane crawls across the ceiling...then it's gone. Loved it.
I think Nuit Blanche needs an injection of theatre, performance, and people. How cool would it have been to see Cirque du Soleil-type acrobats crawling over those slow-moving cranes? And really making those Bay Street carnies standout with crisp suits and Venetian masks.
