After a calm and steady end to what was at times a turbulent stint as Sydney Festival Director for Olivia Ansell – a tenure that included Israel Embassy funding-related artist boycotts and the cancellation of the Festival’s inaugural mid-city music program Summergound in 2024 due to weak market conditions – the esteemed Australian arts leader and her family set off for Canada in March this year to begin her new five-year appointment as Artistic Director of Toronto’s popular Luminato Festival.
Included in Ansell’s first Luminato program – which was delivered over three weeks in June – were some notable Australian works.
As well as presenting shows from over 1000 Canadian artists and numerous other international acts, Ansell invited Australian company Legs On The Wall to stage its epic, eight-hour one-person work THAW – an outdoor performance familiar to many Sydneysiders who will recall seeing its lone performer descending on a diminishing melting ice-block over the Harbour for its premiere season at Sydney Festival in 2022.
For the Luminato Festival, THAW’s 2.7-tonne block of ice and its solo aerialist performer was suspended over Toronto’s Sankofa Square.
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Also from Australia, Japanese-born, Australia-based artist Hiromi Tango, with research support from Dr Emma Burrows, presented the work Rainbow Dreams – a series of experiential environments that audiences encountered at various locations across Toronto city.
But as Ansell continues to champion bold, experimental work created by some of Australia’s best artists, what else has been catching her eye as she immerses herself in the Canadian arts scene?
Toronto: a culturally diverse, late-night art city
Ansell admits that one of her strongest initial impressions of Toronto – a city she visited three times over the past two years before relocating there in February – was its cultural diversity and hugely vibrant late-night music scene.
“Toronto is a very multicultural, 24-hour city,” Ansell tells ArtsHub.
“It’s a place with a greater population of 8.3 million and, yes, there are born and bred Torontonians, but there is also a huge array of cultures that now call this city home.”
As a small local example of its multiculturalism, Ansell describes having Brazilian, Ethiopian, Korean, Eritrean and Nicaraguan restaurants and food offerings on her doorstep, and says she never has to walk beyond her street to feel the city’s cultural diversity.
“Like Australia, there is an extraordinary breadth of Indigenous art to explore,” she adds. “Visual art, film, music… I’m seeing a real sophistication in terms of collaboration between Indigenous artists from Canada and indigenous artists from all around the world here, and that’s inspiring.”
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In terms of Toronto’s cultural night-life, Ansell characterises it as ‘fenceless’ and ‘free-roaming’ – in contrast to her experience of Sydney’s late-night art scene amid its controversial lockout laws, implemented in 2016.
“Toronto’s late-night music scene is unencumbered,” she says.
“There are hundreds of small, late-night music venues and art-come-RnB-hip-hop-style bars across the Greater Toronto Area.
“What’s interesting is that if you ask Torontonians about that, they’ll say, ‘Oh, but over the years we’ve lost this venue and that venue – and Toronto is not what it used to be’,” she says.
“But for me arriving as a newcomer to Toronto, having been a producer in Sydney throughout the lockout laws, it feels like Toronto has this great balance of supporting artists and having trading hours and security structures around that to allow the scene to thrive.”
Canadian artists also hit hard by inflation issues
Despite the richness and vibrancy of Toronto’s small music venue culture, Ansell admits to seeing the same kind of economic problems hit Canadian artists as Australians in recent times.
While Australia’s Federal Treasurer is enthusiastically spruiking the message that our inflationary challenges are all but over, for many Australian artists (and others) inflationary pain still feels very real.
“Canadian artists are definitely feeling the effects of high inflation in a similar way to Australian artists,” Ansell says.
“Costs are going up, and we’re trying to keep ticket prices the same or lower, and funding levels are stagnant, and so that’s the pinch point everyone is feeling.”
Read: Defunding success in the arts is not saving money – it’s destroying value
“That said, we have shown that as a sector we are highly malleable,” she continues, recalling one of her final moves as Sydney Festival Director as an example.
She explains, “When I left [Sydney Festival] in February 2025 we had established a festival ticketing structure where we could offer Sydneysiders prices that immediately addressed the inflationary challenges.
“We set our prices at levels so people could still enjoy the same number of international and Australian festival experiences, without having to make the difficult budgetary choice to reduce the number of shows they were used to seeing.
“So, we really took on what was happening economically and modelled the ticket prices accordingly. And that took some long-term planning, but I’m really pleased we did that.”
Trump’s tariff-factor: does it feel like a trade war?
Finally, at a time when no conversation about Canada is complete without mention of Donald Trump and his tariffs – how is Ansell experiencing these rocky trade tensions from the inside?
She tells ArtsHub, “In some ways it’s no different [to before] because, as everyone knows, Canadians are very friendly people, and very humble – a lot like Australians in that way.
“Though I have seen a noticeable increase in Canadians’ civic pride in recent months,” she continues.
“It’s been quite extraordinary to see whole audiences at major arts events standing to sing the Canadian national anthem. When attending some larger theatre houses in Toronto several months ago, it was a common thing to see.”
Ansell says Canada is seeing (and predicting) a wave of new tourism that, anecdotally, could be linked to the Trump administration’s recent policy changes.
“Anecdotally, I am hearing international tourists say, ‘now is the time for us to discover Canada’,” she says.
“’They tell me that they were going to go to America, but now they want to see the Canadian Rockies, Quebec, Niagara Falls – places like that.”
On that basis, the director says she has high hopes for her own festival over the next four years.
“My prediction is that Luminato is going to absolutely explode numbers-wise next year in particular, because Toronto is hosting the FIFA World Cup next year,” she says.
“So, yes, it’s a very exciting time to be here working with this festival team on a program for this incredible city.”
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