Knocking Down Loneliness in Toronto

Some 8,000 giant blocks were set up around Toronto

If you enjoyed playing dominoes as a child, setting them up vertically and then knocking them down in a line or pattern, then you might have enjoyed the giant version that was recently held in Toronto.

This past weekend volunteers help set up 8,000 lightweight concrete blocks that went down a 2.5km path through Canada's largest city this past weekend. 

Some 200 people helped set up sections of blocks

Some 200 people volunteered and each person was responsible for setting up 30-40 blocks around the pre-determined route that started at the corner of Niagara and Wellington streets and wound its way to the shores of Lake Ontario near Ireland Park.

The giant dominoes has been done in more than 20 cities since 2009, like London, Copenhagen and Melbourne, and the aim is to bring people together, says Julian Maynard Smith, artistic director and co-founder of Station House Opera that organised this project to Toronto.

"[Dominoes] is always about connecting different parts of the city," he says. Cities are by nature, a jumble of diverse people and spaces. And as the dominoes fall, they purposefully wind through the rich, poor, and in-the-middle neighbourhoods of a city. They travel through public and private areas; towering buildings and patches of parkland. The idea was that wherever you went, we would try and find those relationships... and make a line that connected all those different kinds of communities."

And in Toronto it did just that, with people cheering and running along with the giant blocks as they fell, curious to see if it all worked out in the end.

The dominoes were placed in a designed path

"We are closer than we think," says Ilana Altman, co-executive director of The Bentway, a public space that is trying to do community building.

"This season, The Bentway has been reflecting on a lot of reports that we've been hearing across our city... about a growing phenomenon of loneliness and a lack of social connection," she says, pointing to the Toronto Foundation's 2023 Vital Signs Report that the city is one of the loneliest places in Canada.

"So all of our programming has been geared towards helping to foster greater connectivity amongst neighbours," Altman said.

Speaking of lonely... would Hong Kong be interested in hosting this event? Might be fun to have the dominoes falling along the harbour front? Too ambitious to have it going up Lion Rock? Or it's not mega enough of an event?