Celebrate Toronto with Les Girafes

The 7th annual Celebrate Toronto Street Festival begins tomorrow and transforms Toronto’s Yonge St. – at 1,896km long the world’s longest street – in to a giant smorgasbord of food and fun for all ages. The festival usually includes some great puppetry (I caught Germany’s Altrego Theatre there last year) and this year is no exception with the North American premiere of Les Girafes, Urban Operetta by France’s Compagnie Off.

In Les Girafes a herd of nine eight-metre-high red giraffes are “manipulated, articulated and disarticulated” by a crew of 18 stilted performers, who swing the giraffes’ long flexible necks as they stand out nonchalantly against the shops and buildings on Yonge Street. The 60-minute show begins at Yonge-Dundas Square, traveling down Yonge Street to Shuter Street, inviting the crowds to follow them before returning to the Square for the finale.

Here’s a selection of images from Les Girafes (click on the thumbnails to see full size images):

You can catch Les Girafes, Urban Operetta at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto tomorrow night and Saturday at 9 pm. After Toronto the show will be travelling to Montreal where it runs July 19-21 as part of the Just For Laughs Festival.

Special thanks to the City of Toronto’s Special Events department for providing the above images!

06/07/06 Update: I’ve temporarily removed the hyperlinks to the larger versions of the images until the Bear-Town.com site where they were hosted has more bandwidth. Sorry!