Roadworks : Performance Festival and Exhibition

Wednesday July 24
City Beautification Ensemble Let's face it, our city can be a little bit hard to swallow, what with an increased flood of media images, advertising venues and sorry architectural and urban planning choices. It gets to the point where one isn't even sure where to look anymore. And that's where the City Beautification Ensemble comes in! The primary goal of the CBE is to off set the problems existing within the current state of our aesthetic surroundings by reducing what we refer to as the 'Grey-Level' of the built environment by replacing, or masking it with appropriate site-specific mood enhancing colours, otherwise known as 'Rainbow-Energy'. "Spreading beauty throughout the city one neighbourhood at a time."		City Beautification Ensemble Sidewalk Photo: Redmond Wiesenberger City Beautification Ensemble Crew Photo: Ann Kim
BIOGRAPHY City Beautification has a history in Toronto that dates back, as far as we can tell, to the late 1870's. March of 1877 to be exact, is the date of the earliest know documentation of City Beautification activity in the form of a lithographed promotional pamphlet which outlined the need for applied colour theory into the urban landscape and was a call to the people of Toronto to band together in order to create a body of citizens dedicated to making their own direct and lasting mark on urban development. Since that earliest record, City Beautification has made spotty appearances throughout the history of urban planning and development in this city. However, in its most recent incarnation (resurrected in the early spring of 2001 by Redmond Wiesenberger, Duncan Walker and Jason van Horne as the City Beautification Ensemble or simply the 'CBE') we strive to continue on the tradition of colour therapy with our specific brand of Beautification.