BIG on Bloor Festival, Bloor Street from Dufferin to Lansdowne celebrates local business, community, arts and culture with a unique community and city-building festival featuring hundreds of events, activities and exhibitions.
Responding Festival
July 21 & 22
Play-ground, Bloor Street at Dufferin Ave. Toronto
The Responding Festival is a month long project by artists, designers, architects, poets, community groups, residents and volunteers and is a feature event of the BIG On Bloor Festival July 21/22, 2012. Please make Bloor and Dufferin in Toronto a destination for a summer walk, drop by often to see what is evolving and to participate.
The School playground directly edges Bloor Street but is separated by a 12 foot high chain-link barrier fence. Last summer we opened the playground area of the school and offered it as a Bloor Street public space. We will transform the empty space into a public art environment, a collision of art and architecture, performance, poetry, landscape, discussions and playgrounds made by artists and architects, cultural collectives and community participants. The intention is to make a non-stop swirl of activity, a site for evolving experimental forms and new ways of creating in a shared place that responds to the city, the community, each other and being here now.
Responding actively marks the schoolground site for designation as an on-going public space when Kent School closes in June, 2012. The project is an effort to claim the corner of Bloor and Dufferin and safeguard for community use in forth-coming development proposals.
Responding to suicides and summer heat
To do-gooders and never-do-wells
And the woman peeing in the alleyway — she looks up and says she loves me
Responding to the man with a side-ways smile
Building castles on street corners with city planning in his pocket
Responding to the mess, spread eagle
In the sidewalk cracks, flower planters and street gutters
All seasoned rocks of colored gum, crimpled foil shimmering gold, silver and red
Vomit, bottle caps and cigarette butts
Responding to neighbours yelling at each other,
themselves and people that don't exist
Responding to living in a fever and in art and in the smoke of cigarettes
Responding to — not another "hard day's night".
Responding to the intersections of
Building materials, each other and Bloordale
More information about Responding see www.respondingfestival.com | www.poetrylookout.com
Contact dyan@dyanmarie, 416.539.8129 for appointment or to contribute an event.Who is invited to the BIG on Bloor Festival
We invite the local community, residents of Toronto and Canadian and International tourists interested in the contemporary culture: art, performance, music, walking, multi-culturalism, food, and family participatory events.Thank you to our sponsors, contributors, participants and the Bloordale Community.
Everyone is welcomed here.
The BIG on Bloor 2011 Festival is an initiative of the Bloordale BIA.
Bloordale BIA | BIG: Big Improvement Group
For further information please contact:
Dougal Bichan, Musician, Artist, BIG Festival Director
416.645.0295 | dougal@dougalco.com
Dyan Marie, Artist, BIG Co-chair, Bloordale Creative Director
416.539.8129 | dyan@dyanmarie.com