LIGHTSABER BATTLE!!!

Ok, so I get this message from a buddy on Facebook about 2 weeks ago informing me that this wierd performance art company in Toronto is setting up a new event very soon. The company is called "Newmindspace" and they typically organize "urban reclaimation events" which basically take the form of gathering a group of people downtown to do something cool. Past events have included a party on a subway car and a massive (2000+ person) game of capture the flag downtown in the financial district (which was apparently very fun).

So their new event had me very intrigued as the idea for it was to gather a massive amount of people together and have a huge "lightsaber battle". The premise was that people would gather in a pre-planned spot downtown and the organizers would light the area with blacklights and hand out cardboard tubes painted with blacklight responsive paint. The participants would then battle until their tube was broken. A solid plan by most standards and I was pretty interested to see this go down.

So around 9:20 Carole and I show up out front of the Royal Ontario Museum. We were supposed to meet friends there but it quickly became apparent that that was not likely to happen. There was about 3500 people congregated on the sidewalk and it was total mayhem. At first it was really cool as there were quite a few people who were dressed up like Star Wars characters and one confused gentleman who was dressed like a Klingon (but carrying a lightsaber...)

At 9:30 (the planned start time for the event) there was still no organization to be seen. At about 9:45 a couple of people showed up and started setting up blacklights on stands in the crowd. As they fired up the generators and the lights came on it quickly became apparent that the 4 or 5 blacklight tubes they had running were barely bright enough to compete with the ambient street lighting (the museum is on one of the busiest and well lit streets in Toronto). This was a bit of an issue but clearly something that I would be prepared to overlook when faced with the prospect of smacking strangers with a cardboard tube. What was concerning me however, is that the 4 or 5 people that had come to set up the tubes appeared to be the only form of organization or crowd control present.

Close to 10:00 Carole and I noticed some activity at the far end of the crowd from where we were. One of the "organizers" (I use the term loosely at this point) was standing on top a box waving some cardboard tubes over his head and yelling something to the effect of "hey come get your tubes everybody". Anyone who has been involved in any form of event organization will probably now be realizing how bad of an idea this was. There were no barriers set up and nobody directing the crowd into any semblance of order. In fact the only "professional" or "official" personnel there were 2 cops and 3 news crews.

At this point Carole and I began to try and move through the crowd in order to obtain our tubes. About halfway through the crowd I realized that this was total madness. There was 1 person handing out tubes to over 3000 people for one thing. Another issue was the fact that by the time you got to the front to get your tube you were crammed in with thousands of people pushing behind you from all directions so you had no room to swing your tube except for over your head. Carole and I decided to divert our progress out the side of the crowd and watch from a distance rather than get trampled trying to obtain a fucking cardboard tube. Also carole had her $3000 camera around her neck so we didn't want to run the risk of it getting broken.

By the time we got to the side of the crowd and found a decent vantage point we saw the full extent of the debacle. Those people brave or foolish enough to push through the crowd were being handed a flimsy paper tube (think toilet paper roll only longer and spray painted with blacklight paint). The blacklights in the crowd didn't even come close to illuminating the area so the tubes didn't glow at all. Furthermore, by the time you would have obtained a tube and then fought your way out of the crowd to the point where there was enough space to swing it, the majority of people's tubes were already crushed and useless.

We decided to leave at that point and beat the rush at the local Tim Horton's coffee shop. As we sat down to drink a hot chocolate and regain our bearings we watched several light saber wielding youths climb on top of a news van. At this point we decided to take our hot chocolates to go and ride the subway home.

When I heard about this thing I envisioned some kind of organized area, barricaded off for crowd control, with you know, maybe a line or something for getting your tube. What we got instead was an area 1/4 of the size necessary to hold the amount of people there and a complete lack of organization. The 5 people running the event showed up 15 minutes after the start time and clearly did not have a handle on the crowd. This could have been a really really dangerous public hazard issue and for all I know there were casualties that I haven't heard about yet. All in all it was pretty scary in retrospect and I'm going to have to think twice before I go to stuff like this in the future...

WTF is this world coming to where people get trampled trying to get a fucking cardboard tube?