Curatorial Statement

HarbourKIDS: The Toronto International Circus Festival – Get Whimsical!

This year HarbourKIDS celebrates our fifth year partnering with Zero Gravity Circus to bring you the 10th annual Toronto International Circus Festival. We are so lucky to have such an incredible wealth of circus talent at our fingertips, and we don’t take it for granted. In our busy lives, we sometimes forget to take time out to relax and have fun, daydream, imagine and act like children. Even kids sometimes forget to be kids, with the pressures of school and the desire to grow up as fast as possible.

That’s why our buzzword for this year is whimsy. You know what whimsy means? It means to be silly, care-free and to have fun. This is what we want you to experience at HarbourKIDS: The Toronto International Circus Festival. The circus is a reminder not to take everything so seriously all the time, to let go of things that are bothering us, and just loosen up and have a good time. Clowns and acrobats show us how to do this, in case we’ve forgotten. When you’re watching a silks artist spinning high above your head, or laughing at a silly character falling down for a laugh, all the worries in your head fly away.

Dr. Seuss, a.k.a. Theodor Geisel, once said: "I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.” I invite you to grasp the wrong end of the telescope at HarbourKIDS, and just for a while, try to let whimsy be the order of the day.