About Luminato
Luminato 2009 Opening Night Remarks
Good Evening, I am David Pecaut, Co-Chair and Co-Founder of Luminato. On behalf of my co-chair and co-founder Tony Gagliano; Janice Price, our CEO and her fantastic staff; Vice-Chair, Lucille Joseph; our Board of Directors; and our terrific Artistic Advisory Committee, we welcome you to the opening of Luminato 2009.
It was just two years ago that we opened the first Luminato on Bloor St. in front of the new ROM.
Luminato began as a dream - that each year Toronto would invite the world to join us in celebrating creativity.
A dream where the best artists in the world and the best artists in Canada fill the stage that is Toronto with new and wonderful creations.
A dream that we could create in Toronto a festival that would become renowned the world over for its excellence, its originality and its accessibility to all people regardless of background or experience.
Today that dream has become the reality of a boisterous 3-year-old sprawling all over the city with music, theatre, dance, visual arts, literature, film and celebrations of all kinds.
In addition to us here at Massey Hall, thousands are gathered at Yonge-Dundas Square to kick off the Luminato Guitar Festival with Randy Bachman; others are in a warehouse on Dufferin to listen to Murray Shaefer's world premiere of The Children's Crusade; and at Harbourfront the curtain is going up on Tono - a world premiere collaboration of Toronto's Red Sky Company with artists from China and Mongolia.
Luminato embraces the very diversity that is the beating heart of Toronto and is living testimony that creativity is best nourished where cultures come together in a spirit of common humanity and citizenship.
Luminato is mostly free. Of the more than 1 million attendees who came last year, 90 percent attended free events.
This is only possible because of the incredible support of provincial, federal and city government, corporate sponsors and private foundations and donors - especially our Luminaries who backed this vision as angel philanthropists from its earliest days. We are hugely appreciative of all of these supporters.
I want to single out tonight for special thanks Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Honourable Greg Sorbara of the Ontario government who are in the audience and who believed in and supported the dream of Luminato from the very beginning. I also want to recognize and thank Javier San Juan, the CEO of L'Oréal Canada. He and his team at L'Oréal have been steadfast and innovative partners in creativity as our lead sponsor.
One can note the artistic and economic impact of Luminato, but its core purpose is something larger:
Luminato is a hugely personal and collective enterprise.
In a digital age, a festival like this is one dimension of human activity that must still be experienced in person. It is a shared spectacle. Luminato's roots go back to our earliest cultural experiences before we even lived in cities and practised formal arts.
At its core Luminato is about the creativity in each one of us. We know that each and every child is fundamentally a creative being. Over our lives, some of that creativity is lost. Luminato is a time, a place and a set of experiences where each of us can reconnect with the creative in ourselves.
The dream of Luminato, a dream we can all dedicate ourselves to this week, is that each of us can discover and share our innate creativity. And in doing so, connect with one another as a community here in Toronto in the most powerful way we know.
In closing, I want to thank the hundreds of artists, support personnel, the incredible Luminato staff, and very importantly, the nearly 500 volunteers that make Luminato possible. And of course, I want to thank you for coming. I hope you will explore all Luminato has to offer these next ten days.
It is my pleasure now to declare Luminato 2009 officially opened.
Thank you