Tom Beedham, Noisey

The apocalypse began before the audience could find its seats. While some still filtered in from the Toronto Sony Centre’s lobby, in an unnerving scene of delirium, actors situated throughout the audience stood and shouted proclamations for the end of the world in English, German, and Latin, silencing excited chatter about the epic sensory buffet that was about to unfold.

In a talk preceding Luminato’s mounting of R. Murray Schafer’s Apocalypsis (previously performed only twice in London, ON in 1980), festival artistic director Jorn Weisbrodt advised not to seek hints of intended meaning, emotion, or story in the performance, instead describing the production as a sort of communal becoming that depends on the individual histories of its audiences and subsequently continues to manifest itself beyond the curtain drop. That sounds like a pretty flimsy guiding principal to rally 1000 performers around, but it was also very effective.

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