Blog Guelph: The White Night

pastel moon, a photo by digitalambitions/ Valerie Hogg on Flickr.

Once a year we celebrate The White Night: Nuit Blanche in Guelph. It's the one night we stay alight, sleepless, inspired in the streets and sanctuaries of music and art.

With the Guelph Jazz Festival already underway with a remarkable performance by Beautiful Tool last night, this year's festival promises to culminate in a truly spectacular white night this Saturday and I hope you'll come into the fold, to revel, to run and ramble with a raucous release.

And I do call it a fold deliberately. Because to me, this festival is like a meeting of family, a confluence of like minds setting foot to play and test, challenge and foray, out in the green pastures and in the rustle tussle of the shifting sheaving shaking and so often wisdom-sharing winds. The fold: it is a place where ideas are borne up out of the roots of time and beat out in percussions of sky, rain, the snow of unconscious desires dreams drifting and dodging, the rainbows of clash and harmony shining always overhead. It is in the intimacy of the fold, that we meet each other anew - in sound and in the intersections of stillness that we come to be unclad from ourselves. We can cast off our worldly armour and be vulnerable to the unexpected, the tempting, the exciting, the moving, the difficult, the magnificence of our human natures unbound by sound.

The Guelph Jazz Festival always brings us here - into this verdant and vivacious and vivid fold. Reminding us of the power of music to create communities, build confidence, inspire new philosophies and evoke alternative understandings of ourselves and our environments – social, political, and physical.

So don’t let your Saturday be dark. Let it be light.

Let it be The White Night.

~Aidan M.D. Ware