CLASS OF 2007: THE ARTS
WILL JANICE PRICE HATCH THE NEXT GREAT FESTIVAL?
Another year, another set of great expectations. Can we solve the waterfront (finally)? Can we make the urban vote count in the provincial elections? Can we embrace arts mega-festival with outsize ambitions? Here are five movers and shakers who will leave a footprint - hopefully a good one - on the city in 2007
VAL ROSS
When Janice Price, 51, was growing up in the suburb of Agincourt, her Scottish immigrant parents' idea of performing arts was party pieces at family get-togethers. Janice's specialty was singing The Northern Lights of Auld Aberdeen. The big theatre highlight for the Agincourt MacDonalds was to go once a year with their four children to the White Heather concert at Massey Hall.
So, Toronto wasn't a city of artistic surprises back then. It is now. And it's about to become even more so this June with Luminato, the arts festival of which Ms. Price is CEO. The 10-day, multi-venue extravaganza will bring together international and Canadian artists to produce an ambitious array of weird synergies, creative collaborations and world premieres.
What happens when you link composer Philip Glass and poet Leonard Cohen? Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan and Turkish video artist Kutlug Ataman? Monty Python and Handel? "The home run, for me," she says, "will be when things happen in Luminato that are genuinely new, that could not have been created or replicated anywhere else."
Ms. Price has the credentials. In university, she landed a summer job at CTV's Toronto station. Within five years, she was the programming director. She moved on to marketing jobs at Roy Thomson Hall, then Stratford, the Hummingbird Centre and New York's Lincoln Center. After becoming interim director of the Lincoln in 2001, Ms. Price left to become CEO of Philadelphia's newly-opened Kimmel Center. The Kimmel's first season produced a deficit of $3.8-million (U.S.). By the time Ms. Price left last year, she'd announced a surplus.
What brought her back to Hogtown? She's a fast-talking optimist, a romantic who fixes you with her wide eyes while spilling out a stream of exciting possibilities. In this she's not unlike financier David Pecaut, the man who dreamed up Luminato along with Tony Gagliano, CEO of St. Joseph Media.
When Mr. Pecaut approached her this past May, she told him she was happy in Philadelphia. But Mr. Pecaut out-Priced Ms. Price, barraging her with visions of what the festival could do for her home town. She'd done arts centres and big-ticket festivals. How about taking arts into the streets . . . art without walls? She couldn't say no.
Since Ms. Price moved back to Hogtown this fall, she has been sprinting with the project's schedule. "We're thrilled so far --she has terrific international connections and can deal directly with people, on a basis of trust, in the global arts producing scene," Mr. Pecaut says. But he cautions that Luminato is far more complex than running the Kimmel or Lincoln Center. "This a tissue of events she's producing . . . the whole city is the festival."
