Jump to Comments

If you’d wandered into Yonge-Dundas square in the heart of downtown Toronto at 1AM Sunday morning you would have seen a strange sight. A couple of hundred people dancing under a huge canopy of colourfully lit balloons.

The most striking thing though was the silence, with only the shuffle and stamp of feet on the dance floor, a little conversation and the occasional whoop. The reason for the quiet is the rule that no amplified music can be played outside in the city after 11PM. To get around that Luminato provided a set mixed by AC Slater as an MP3 download, which you could drop onto your iPod and bring along to the square. So all the dancers were listening to the night’s soundtrack through their own headphones. This is a silent rave, happy bylaw officers, happy late night dancers.

As part of the work that David, Gabe and I are doing on the lightning control for the balloons we put together the light show for the night and it was a lot of fun.

Raju Mudhar from The Star described it like this:

“With the choreographed lighting from the balloons in the square, it did feel a bit like an outdoor club. But more than that, it was spontaneous and fun. People shared earphones with those that didn’t have. Every festival in town could use more of these types of moments.”

There are tons more pictures of the night over on Flickr.