Your Nuit Blanche 2010 Guide: Zone B

By Torontoist

Need a side order of shopping with your artistic installation? Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Nuit Market Starring the Toronto Weston Flea Market (above) will serve your needs late into the night. The group behind 2007’s dance lessons at Hart House is bringing west-end bargain hunting downtown for the evening, with promises of evoking street markets from around the world. As with any deal, the artists urge you to act fast before the tents are taken away! JB
Nathan Phillips Square will be the backdrop for a mix of music (live and canned) and experimental performance films as it hosts, in the words of producer Daniel Lanois, “an enchanted forest of sound.” Later That Night At The Drive-In is among a flurry of works over the next month from Lanois, who is still recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle accident in June. Through a large number of screens and speakers set up around the square, Lanois hopes that spectators will be fully immersed in the experience. As he told the Star last week, “at a rock show, if you’re not in the lucky first thirty rows you don’t get the sound. Here, no one gets a bad seat.” Neil Young fans may want to drop by at midnight to hear four songs from his new Lanois-produced album Le Noise. JB

It has finally happened. Climate change has destroyed modern civilization, and tribes of survivors must venture northward to escape the heat and natural disasters that ravage Southern Ontario. But before they go, the nomads will congregate in the Distillery District for one last effort to make contact with their loved ones lost in the disaster. In Benecorpo Community‘s Way-Station (North Migration) (above), Nuit Blanche-rs can leave behind pre-apocalyptic mementos to create an ever-expanding shrine that grows as more and more choose to pursue salvation and leave the doomed city behind. CM
Reunion, 2010 is going to be an homage to a 1968 performance art event that took place at the Ryerson Theatre, in which Marcel Duchamp, in what’s thought to have been his last public appearance, made experimental music with John Cage and a few other sound-art luminaries, using a specially modified chess board. This time around, the performance will last twelve full hours, and will include “a number of local and international participants influenced by the twin legacies of Cage and Duchamp.” Cage and Duchamp themselves were, of course, unavailable to reprise their performance, being dead. SK

Written by Jamie Bradburn (JB), Amanda Happé (AH), Steve Kupferman (SK), Carly Maga (CM), and Suzannah Showler (SS). Compiled by David Topping. Maps by Marc Lostracco.
Images not otherwise credited are courtesy of Nuit Blanche, or the websites of their respective artists and exhibits.