About the Festival - Lumière Festival

WHAT IS IT?

The Lumière Festival is a chance to celebrate the magic and beauty of light!

The Lumière Festival is a well planned and safe lantern festival, based on similar festivals throughout the world and designed so that the region can be creative and come together for a night of calm and enjoyment. Whether you are on your own or with your family, a teen or a senior, this Festival will AMAZE you, mostly because of the imaginative lanterns you, your friends and neighbours have created from some tissue paper and bamboo. Children are delighted to be part of the magic, fairy wings bumping behind them as they proudly carry their very own jam jar lantern.

WHY HAVE A LANTERN FESTIVAL?

The Lumière Festival makes art accessible and contagious, allowing community members to create their own lantern or costumes in workshops led by trained lantern facilitators. The workshops allow for a range of artistic levels and ages, ensuring that everybody can be creative, and allowing community members to participate to the best of their own artistic ability. It also allows the community to witness a diverse variety of art and performance. Professional artists create large and involved lantern installations using advanced materials and themes. Performers create works that encompass the Lumière themes of magic and light.

The beauty of the Lumière Festival is found in the joyful simplicity of candlelight. Used in religious, social and cultural rituals and celebrations around the world, candlelight and lanterns enchant everybody. This is especially true at the Lumière Festival when Stanley Park becomes a magical ocean of light coupled with high caliber and professional musical, theatrical and dance performances.

Musicians, stilt walkers and Shakespearean actors lead costumed participants, each holding a lantern they have created themselves, along a marked route where large lantern installations and performers have been placed according to the nature of their design or performance.

Participants exclaim in awe over a giant and multi layered paper sun, linger to watch Koichi Yano from the Le Groupe Dance Lab perform on a single rope, watch professional fire spinners Fire Weavers weave illuminated patterns in a breathtaking performance of dance and fire artistry, while they marvel at their neighbours’ home made lantern creations.

The Lumière Festival is also an opportunity to pursue ideals of multiculturalism, partnership, and volunteer development through the creation of community-based art. The Lumière Festival brings unity to individuals and groups from diverse cultures, languages, ages, and socio economic backgrounds, while allowing them to creatively highlight elements of themselves through their lantern, costume, or performance. It also provides professional artists and performers with an exciting new venue – one which is intimate and interactive - in which to showcase their abilities.

WHEN WAS THE FESTIVAL STARTED?

The first Ottawa lantern festival took place in Strathcona Park in 2003 and was organized by the two person Wild Infinity Training Ltd. The following year the CCCC was awarded an Ontario Trillium Foundation grant so that they could coordinate a lantern festival. The CCCC and Wild Infinity agreed to work together to create the first Ottawa Lumiere Festival which launched on August 28, 2004.

WHO IS THE CRICHTON CULTURAL COMMUNITY CENTRE (CCCC)?

The mandate of the CCCC is to develop the historic Crichton School building into a dynamic artistic regional hub that supports, fosters, facilitates and develops the provision of gathering places and spaces, programming and initiatives or activities that provide professional and non-professional artists and communities, opportunities for creativity, learning, knowledge and development that are accessible, welcoming, diverse, and fun.

The CCCC offers space to artists, performers and community members. The centre is used for summer theatre & music camps, weekly courses such as yoga, rhythmic gymnastics, and figure painting and for rehearsals, meetings and parties. Currently the CCCC hosts 4 art studios, 1 music studio and 1 large community room.

In 2004, the CCCC created and managed the Lumière Lantern Festival project. The festival and its preparation is a very effective development tool in providing effective outreach in the realization of the CCCC mandate.

The Community Centre is the Lumière Headquarters. The CCCC Community Facilitator is organizing the Festival, with the help of an HRDC Career Placement student. True to the sprit of a fledging event, a large team of dedicated Festival Volunteers are performing the real work!