When The Wizard of Oz and a Live Orchestra Turned Meridian Hall into a Space Between Imagination and Reality
Advertisement for the 1925 silent-film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Chadwick Pictures, published in The Film Daily, December 10, 1925. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
At two o’clock on Saturday, September 12, we gathered inside Meridian Hall.
We came from different parts of the city, of different ages and from lives that may have had little in common. Most of us did not know one another, and we would probably never meet in precisely that arrangement again. Before the lights dimmed, we were not yet a “we”—only hundreds of separate lives occupying the same room.
Then the screen awakened.
Kansas appeared in sepia, with a girl looking beyond the limits of her world. Beneath her sat 64 musicians of the TO Live Orchestra. The images had been recorded in 1939, but the music was being born before us. One world belonged to the past; the other existed only in that moment.
Somewhere between them, an invisible door opened.
We passed through it without standing up. We left our streets and separate histories behind and became something without a face or name: a presence made of hundreds of eyes, following a girl who wanted to travel beyond the rainbow.
Like a shadow with hundreds of bodies, we followed Dorothy.
But when had we agreed to follow her? With the first note? When the tornado lifted her farmhouse? Or when she opened the door and stepped from the muted colours of Kansas into the impossible brightness of Oz?
We had not forgotten where we were. We still saw the screen and the strangers around us. We knew the witch was not real, scarecrows could not speak, and ruby slippers could not carry anyone home.
Our disbelief had not disappeared. It remained seated beside us.
Yet something else had crossed the threshold.
Our minds knew Dorothy’s journey had been recorded almost ninety years earlier and its ending could no longer change. But our bodies behaved as if the danger were unfolding for the first time. The witch silenced hundreds of real voices. The tornado tightened hundreds of throats. A girl composed of projected light could make a creature with hundreds of lungs hold a single breath.
Perhaps belief was the wrong word. We did not believe in Oz. We lent it our bodies.
It borrowed our breathing, fear, laughter, and hope. In return, it offered something the ordinary world rarely does: hundreds of strangers briefly united by a feeling, without knowing one another’s names.
The orchestra made the crossing almost visible. Above us, Oz existed as light and shadow. Below it, bows moved, wind instruments breathed, and percussion trembled through the floor. The musicians were real, yet their bodies answered to an imaginary world. Their music gave weight to a tornado and longing to a road found on no map.
The images belonged to 1939. The orchestra belonged to that afternoon. Toronto waited beyond the walls. Yet for two hours, all three occupied the same impossible moment.
Which of them was reality: the city outside, the music travelling physically through the hall, or Oz—a place that did not exist but could move everyone inside it?
Perhaps imagination is not the opposite of reality; perhaps it is one way reality reveals its invisible parts.
In Oz, nothing invisible remains without a body. Fear becomes a witch, uncertainty a road, and hope a green city. Intelligence, love, and courage walk beside Dorothy, embodied by companions who cannot yet recognize what they already possess. Oz does not replace reality. It turns reality inside out.
If an imaginary world can make real bodies laugh, tremble, and hold their breath together, how unreal can it be? Perhaps reality shows us what exists, while imagination shows us what that existence means.
When the final note faded, the musicians lowered their instruments, the screen went dark, and the lights came back up. The invisible creature we had become began to break apart. We stood, found the aisles, and returned to our separate names and lives.
Outside, Toronto was waiting, apparently unchanged.
But we had entered a world that did not exist and returned carrying something real. Maybe that is why we continue to dream. We do not always enter imaginary worlds to escape reality. Sometimes we follow them so far that, when we return, reality finally becomes visible.
Soon, another “we” will gather at Meridian Hall. It will follow a dragon on October 16 and 17, then search for a lost ark on November 27 and 28. Its faces will be different, but when the lights dim, another invisible door will open—and another group of strangers will agree to dream together.
YF, September 14, 2026
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