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Rave culture celebration cancelled
iDance a victim of rising costs and a dwindling audience in Toronto
By Ben Rayner
Pop Music Critic
Dwindling corporate-sponsorship dollars and spiralling costs have put a stop, at least temporarily, to hopes of turning Toronto's massive, open-air electronic-music festival iDance into an annual event.
Organizers had floated the idea of bringing iDance — which began two summers ago as a beat-fuelled protest rally intent on overturning a city-council ban on raves on city property — back for a third run this summer after last year's free party drew an estimated 30,000 electronic-music fans, roughly double its original attendance, to Nathan Phillips Square on the Labour Day long weekend.
That plan has been shelved, however, because the non-profit event has been unable to locate enough corporate sponsors (last year's biggest were the Microsoft Xbox and The Star) willing to cover its costs.
"We very quickly found out that most companies that would sponsor this kind of thing had much smaller budgets than they did last year, as a result partly of Sept. 11," says iDance president Will Chang, adding insurance costs for the event were also quoted at "about seven times what we paid last year" in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
"At the end of the day, it's really just that the money wasn't there. We didn't make any money last year, and in fact, we lost quite a bit of money that actually came out of our own pockets....
"Unfortunately, the only companies these days that will sponsor an event of this size are cigarette and beer companies like Smirnoff and Bacardi and Benson & Hedges, and they can only sponsor 19-plus events. We didn't want to do iDance on a smaller scale, and we certainly didn't want to make it a 19-plus event."
Still, says Chang, it should be rememberd that iDance accomplished its original goals of getting the City of Toronto to relax the knee-jerk war it briefly waged on raves in 2000, opening a dialogue between promoters and the police and "giving the electronic-party industry some cultural legitimacy in the eyes of the media." And, he adds, no one has ruled out doing another party in the future.
The passing of iDance nevertheless means the loss of a unifying point for Toronto's splintered electronic-music community, which, frustrated at a lack of venues, dwindling crowds and the rising cost of hiring paid-duty police officers for security, among other things, has largely abandoned the enormous parties that were common two or three years ago in favour of club nights in licensed venues and smaller underground events. Younger dance-music fans lose out, since all-ages events catering to the non-drinking crowd are few and far between these days.
"The rave scene is dead, it's finished, it's over. It's gone," says Alex D., editor/publisher of the long-running Toronto nightlife magazine Tribe. "For the last few months, everyone I meet — friends, DJs, promoters — I ask: `What do you think happened?' And nobody really knows. Nobody knows where everybody went and nobody knows what's going to become of the scene....
"I liken it to stacking pennies. You can keep stacking them so they get higher and higher and better looking and more valuable, but there comes a point where it's going to topple over."
>I don't know what to say, is the rave scene dead??
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iDance Cancelled........
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awwz..
I miss them too, this is horrible news.
