ABSTRACT
Introduction on a sunny September weekend, parks in downtown Toronto’s Queen West and Parkdale neighbourhoods became rowdy spaces for people in their mid 20s and early 30s to play tag, capture the flag and red rover. The Time out/Game on intervention invited ‘participants and viewers to celebrate the spirit of the playground in and outside the park, while challenging our notion of playful space and submission to the rules of the game’ (Balzer, 2007). Curated by Toronto artists and playwrights, these games were part of a broad range of interventions in the Play/Grounds participatory performance series that were part of the Queen West Art Crawl, a neighbourhood arts festival in Toronto’s downtown Queen West neighbourhood. Some other performance interventions in this series included interactive, site-specific plays in the nearby boutique hotel and Toronto artist Jon Sasaki’s installation in the local Salvation Army store, where the windows were taped shut and the space was filled with black light. The space was ‘black enough for bewilderment, but just enough for your eyes to adjust so you could find your crocheted toaster covers’ (Operation Centaur Rodeo, 2007) and the shoppers were given individual flashlights to shop that day. Funded by the local Parkdale Liberty Economic Development Corporation (PLEDC), the Parkdale Business Improvement Areas and Artscape, a non-profit organization that promotes affordable housing for artists as well as ‘culture-led regeneration … stewarding creative communities, and playing a catalytic role in the revitalization of some of Toronto’s most creative communities’ (Artscape, 2008), the events animated the streets and brought people together in interactive performances that revealed complex layers, histories and narratives about the two neighbourhoods.
