On Saturday, we met up with Dave, Peter and Sophia for some Wintercity activities. Wintercity is Toronto’s winter festival answer to Ottawa’s Winterlude and the Quebec Winter Festival, although most of the events are overshadowed (at least on this blog) by Winterlicious. You may remember my previous Wintercity-related blogs in which I talked about Toronto Water.

This year, there were fewer concerts (although I kind of wanted to go to Tokyo Police Club after the Truffles dinner but more interesting events. We saw an hour-long performance of Alice in Wonderland on stilts, which aside from a remarkably cold -1°C, was neat. The idea of using stilts was a very clever idea, because instead of being on a stage, the performance was physically within the crowd. There were crowd ushers clearing away people so the actors and vehicles could move around , and character entrances were from every corner. It made it seem like a very interactive experience. Although it would have been more interactive were we able to understand the story (and it didn’t help that they spoke in French and Italian ((and German?)) at various times). We saw the 5PM show, which meant the sun was setting and I didn’t have great light (although it was a cloudy day to begin with).

Afterwards, we headed indoors to heat up a bit before heading outside to watch the lighting of Nights of Fire put on by France’s Cie Carabosse. This was another dead simple idea that was brilliant. It consisted of clay pots arranged on metal stands (think stands for flower pots) and then lit on fire. There weren’t any acrobatics, or art; it was just fire in pots! We were lucky to be on location when the event started and saw them lighting the displays, which I guess is better than showing up later and watching fire in pots. Although, standing around watching fire in pots is at least warmer than standing around.

Afterwards, we went for another Winterlicious dinner which I’ll blog about later. I wanted to book a decent place (which is why I spent Thursday calling around); but being unsuccessful, figured we would just decide on something the day of. Then I remembered, that we went to Bb33 for Winterlicious last year, and it was pretty empty (and close!) so we ended up going there for dinner.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: toronto, winter