City of a thousand festivals

July was a particularly fertile month for festivals. On one recent weekend, there was so much going on that it literally became frustrating — there was no way any mere mortal could take it all in. A few blocks from my house, the Corso Italia was in full festival mode, with music and food and even carnival rides for the kiddies. Families flooded the area, and the sense of community was strong.

Meanwhile, the much larger Celebrate Toronto Street Festival, organised by the municipal government, had blocked off four of the city’s busiest intersections and given the space over to all manner of music and street theatre. One intersection was dedicated to child-friendly activities (clowns, face painting, children’s theatre); another specialised in jazz and Big Band music; yet another sought out the youth audience by featuring rock and salsa bands, and massive theatrical events. The weather was fine, so needless to say thousands upon thousands of people flocked to the festival venues.

But Toronto has four million inhabitants, so it wasn’t hard to find many more thousands of people to fill up all the other events that were happening that weekend. At Queen’s Park, Afrofest attracted every head-tie and dashiki in the city (and others as well, of course). With its diverse and growing diasporas, the city is now able to produce musicians and dancers from some of the remotest corners of Africa — and food to match.

Meanwhile, at City Hall, 500 artists were displaying their canvases at the annual Toronto Art Show; and down at the Lakefront, the Grand Prix auto races attracted 165,000 people over three days of roaring motors. And at Harbourfront, which is kind of a non-stop festival venue during the summer, electronic music was being spotlighted at an event dubbed Beats, Breaks and Culture.

As if all this weren’t enough, that was also the weekend of the World Cup Final — with Italy’s (questionable) win, the party on the Corso Italia exploded into near-insanity. With the sea of waving flags and delirious celebrants, I was reminded of Jouvert. Anyone making the mistake of wearing or bearing French colours might well have been considered an endangered species.

Car horns blared and people sang and drank and climbed on lampposts until three in the morning — a truly astounding event in this city, where strict noise by-laws shut down festivals by 11 pm, and where a car horn is only ever heard just before its owner rear-ends you (or if you hesitate at a stop-light!).

(Incidentally, a digression: If Trinis think they are diehard soccer fans, they have a long way to go. The Italian community in Toronto defines the word “fanatic.” One man, in the days before the final match, commandeered his cousins and painted his entire house in the Italian tricolour. Even his daughter thought he was crazy. I couldn’t help wondering what he’d have done had Italy lost.)

And all those events, let me repeat, happened over the course of a single weekend. The previous week, the ever-expanding Toronto Jazz Festival had been the main event on the calendar, and the following week, the Fringe Theatre festival grabbed the spotlight, with close to 140 plays running non-stop from midday to midnight at a dozen theatres across the city. Not to mention the two-day Salsa Festival, again virtually at my front door. This weekend, the Beaches Jazz Festival will be the big attraction, culminating in a day of free open-air music.

Apart from the big mainstream festivals, there is no shortage of smaller, community-based events: last weekend Toronto’s Sri Lankan Hindus celebrated their annual chariot festival — something which I’ve never even heard of in Trinidad, despite our sizable Hindu population.

The East Indian community is also currently in the throes of Masala! Mehndi! Masti! — an ongoing extravaganza of South Asian (as they call it here) food, arts and culture; while virtually across the road from this is an out-of-this-world installation of massive Chinese lantern structures, with, of course, accompanying food, art and performances. I really don’t know why Torontonians bother to travel anymore — just about every culture is right on their doorstep.

And speaking of cultural festivals, let’s not forget the biggest and most bacchanalian (in both senses of the word) of all: Caribana. The Parade of the Bands is slated for the first Saturday in August; about a million spectators are expected.

Of course, while the Indians and Chinese and Italians and everyone else are quietly mounting their festivals and counting their money, Caribana has (as usual) been embroiled in controversy for months. Over the years, because of the huge numbers of tourists that it attracts to the city, the festival has been drawing quite sizable amounts of government funding, to the point where it depends on this money for its existence.

However, as anyone familiar with Trini Carnival and the NCC might expect, the Caribana Committee has been — shall we say — not exactly rigorous in its accounting of these monies over the years. The authorities have been trying in vain to instill accountability, and finally this year, in the absence of properly audited accounts from the committee for last year’s funds, the government announced that the money would instead go to the mas’ bands leaders’ association — thus cutting the Caribana Committee out of the picture.

Needless to say, this created mass hysteria amongst the affected group. Since the committee owns the “Caribana” brand, they threatened to withhold permission for it to be used — which would have meant calling the festival something else altogether. That, of course, would have been a marketing disaster, and prospective tourists would probably have stayed home in droves.

A compromise of some sort was finally reached, with a couple of committee members being incorporated into the rival body; and this year’s festival is now being promoted as the Toronto Caribbean Carnival Caribana.

A cumbersome compromise — how quintessentially Canadian. But that won’t bother the celebrants. Everyone will jump and wine (the festival’s motto this year is “we jumping higher”) — and with any luck, no-one will be shot.