Luminato Festival brings 8-hour aerial spectacle to Toronto's Sankofa Square

Nobody in Toronto goes to the corner of Yonge and Dundas to be reminded of Earth's fragile beauty. The intersection is a grimy locus of urban activity. It's where you'll find tourists and Eaton Centre shoppers, buskers, street preachers and pigeons in unknowable quantities. But this weekend, the spot will also be home to a theatrical spectacle: a free, eight-hour show which could plausibly compete with any distraction the city can throw at it.

On Saturday and Sunday in Sankofa Square, the Luminato Festival will present Thaw, a production by the Australian aerial performance company, Legs on the Wall. The show's centrepiece is a glistening, manufactured iceberg weighing 2.7 tonnes, and beginning at 1 p.m. daily, a revolving cast of solo actors will perform on its slippery surface, testing the limits of endurance while the platform below their feet melts away.

"It's talking about there being no time to waste," says Olivia Ansell, Luminato's new artistic director. In our plans to have greater sustainability and climate action, we have made progress, but you know, are we making progress fast enough?" 

The show was originally commissioned for the 2022 Sydney Festival in Australia, where Ansell was festival director before joining Luminato. There, Thaw was staged over Sydney Harbour and livestreamed to the world. Three years on, the fight to slow global warming faces new challenges. In January, the United States withdrew (again) from the Paris Climate Accord, and further environmental protocols have been threatened or rolled back. "This work suddenly became even more pertinent," says Ansell, and Thaw will arrive in Toronto following international appearances in cities such as Auckland, Antwerp and London. 

Some 16,000 people to date have experienced the show live, and according to Joshua Thomson, the company's artistic director, Thaw isn't meant to leave anyone feeling crushed by climate anxiety, as urgent as its call to action may be. Thomson, who also created the piece, began developing Thaw in the wake of Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires, a disaster which destroyed nearly 3,000 homes as it burned through an estimated 18.6 million hectares of the country. 

"I wanted to make work that sort of encapsulated the fragility of our planet," he says, and in the hot climate of Australia, nothing could be more vulnerable than an ice cube, even one big enough to double as a stage. "The aim was to build something beautiful," he says. "I wanted to build a work that was wondrous, and I wanted to reflect the beauty of the planet that we have right now."

So what will that look like in Toronto, where Thaw is making its North American premiere? Free performances of Thaw will be taking over Sankofa Square on Saturday and Sunday (June 7 and 8), and unlike previous productions, which were staged over water, Thomson says the Toronto edition will be performed in the round.

The iceberg itself should be impossible to miss. As of writing, the sculpture is still chilling in a specialized freezer, somewhere in the Toronto area. The freezing process requires 21 days, says Thomson, and the company will only be making two: one for each day of the production. That means they'll have no back-up 'bergs in case of disaster; "there is no chance for mistakes," laughs Thomson.

During Thaw, the iceberg will be suspended in the square from a crane, and the vehicle functions like a performer in the show. "The crane, actually, is this wonderful dancer — a duet partner with the ice," says Thomson. "At some points the ice will come down to eye level with the patrons, almost within touching distance," he says. At other moments, it will hoist the iceberg high above the crowd, taking its attendant dancer with it. 

The performers, who all appear solo, play distinct characters, and the piece has three acts which transpire over Thaw's eight hours. By the end, half of the iceberg's mass will have melted away. (That's essentially 1,300 litres of runoff, by Thomson's estimate.) 

I wanted to build a work that was wondrous, and I wanted to reflect the beauty of the planet that we have right now.- Joshua Thomson, artistic director of Legs on the Wall

There's an arc to the entire piece, but Thomson doesn't imagine many viewers will be there for the long haul. Instead, he hopes they'll come across the work — and linger — while passing through the square at various points of the afternoon. The beauty of Thaw is how its call to action can be read in a single photograph, but even so, a picture won't give you a sense of what it feels like to grapple and move — for hours on end — atop a giant block of ice. And that struggle drives the message of the show.

Thomson created Thaw's choreography in collaboration with the performers. It's a piece that responds to an obvious but unusual set of challenges. Ice is cold. It's wet. It's slippery. And on top of all that, it's unpredictable. On performance day, there's no telling how heat and wind and sun are going to shape and warp its form.

"There is actually a lot of license for the performer to make decisions for themselves," says Thomson, who describes the choreography as a "catalogue of movements." If and when the dancers need to improvise, they can pull from it on the spot. 

But the simple fact of being left alone on the ice for hours at a time can have a powerful effect on the audience, says Thomson. As he's taken Thaw to cities around the world, he's watched passersby become transfixed by the scene. "They start to empathize with the performer, not the character," he says. "They're wet, they're cold." And when they realize that, folks feel compelled to do something to help, however small. "There are moments where a performer might be talking and all of a sudden the audience member is talking to them," he says. "We've had audience members get our performers coffees and stuff like that," says Thomson.

"There's something in the effort — the actual mental, emotional, physical strain that they have to go through to do the performance — that is an echo of the action I think we all must do."

"We must all try harder," says Thomson. "It will take commitment, but we can do it."

Thaw by Legs on the Wall. Presented by the Luminato Festival. June 7 and 8. Sankofa Square, Toronto. www.luminatofestival.com