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She's sold everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim and dazzled the entire arts world with her marketing skills. Now Janice Price is shining the spotlight on Toronto as CEO of the ambitious Luminato festival BY REBECCA HARRIS
Janice Price is known to walk out of her office when big deadlines loom and do her "ra ra cheerleading thing" to her small staff and volunteers, working away in their open-concept loft space on Queen Street East in Toronto.
"If we can't have fun doing this for a living, we should all go home," the sprightly CEO of Luminato, an ambitious new Toronto arts festival, will declare. Or, "no lives will be lost in the mounting of this festival!"
Once, while Price was in London, England on business, her staff frantically sent her e-mails during a critical moment in production of the festival's 40-page programming brochure. Sensing tension was rising, she called the office and had her assistant put her on speakerphone.
"Everybody take a deep breath, slop what you're doing for five minutes and talk to one of your colleagues about something other than work right now," said Price. "I appreciate you're all striving for perfection but [the brochure] will come off the press and the first things you'll see is some typo that you can't believe yon missed. It's going to happen."
While she isn't exactly blasé about the small stuff-she has a say in everything from key chain orders to ad copy-Price has a keen sense of the big picture. When recruiting staff, she lures them with a sense of legacy: "Do vou know how it's going to feel to be able to say 30 years from now that I was part of the team that founded and launched Luminato?"
Price, 51, is back in her hometown after a long career in managing and marketing brick-and-mortar institutions that house the arts, including Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, Ontario's Stratford Festival, New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. For the first time, she's an arts marketer without a building, but the way she looks at it, Luminato is actually "a performing arts centre without walls."
That fits perfectly with lier mandate to make the arts accessible to everyone....