WHAT DOES “FAQ” STAND FOR?

Frequently Asked Questions!

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 New Edinburgh 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.

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 PUTS THE FESTIVAL TOGETHER?*
The festival is administered by the Crichton Cultural Community Centre. 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 Community Centre is the Lumière Headquarters. The CCCC’s Board of Directors hires an Artistic Director, (Scott Florence from A Company of Fools in 2010) to organizing the Festival, with the help of the CCCC’s facilitators, two HRDSC Job Creation staff, a production manager and hundreds of volunteers!
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