At the Vancouver Art Gallery on Friday, June 22

To say that the Vancouver Art Gallery's first all-night art rave was a smashing success would be an understatement: more than 2,000 urban sophisticates turned up for the dusk-to-dawn gala, nearly four times as many as gallery staff had anticipated.

Even outside on Robson Street, the idle chatter was all about the goings-on at the former courthouse. (Overheard from one testosterone-fuelled club kid: "If you want to pick up art chicks, that's the place to be!") And inside, it was well-behaved pandemonium, as friends greeted friends, surveyed interesting strangers, and placed cellphone calls to invite others on down.

The throngs were both a pleasure and a problem. It's rare that a Vancouver party has such a crackling sense of event, but at the same time what should have been entertainment came perilously close to irritainment. The sheer volume of attendees made it difficult to look at the art; both the fourth-floor lounge and the Gallery Café were almost impossible to access due to long, long, long lineups; and the crowd-generated decibels made it hard to hear the improv bands playing in the gallery's rotunda–which is not the most acoustically friendly environment at the best of times.

The members of the Radix Theatre company had a good idea of how to deal with the chaos: in several locations they'd placed large cardboard shipping containers to serve as self-contained mini-venues, or "Performance Art Traps", in which one viewer at a time could enjoy a personalized theatrical encounter with, say, a chess master or a scantily clad ingénue. The key point here was "one viewer at a time". With four traps in operation between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m., and each encounter lasting approximately five minutes, that means that a maximum of 192 gallerygoers would be able to participate. Have we mentioned that there were 2,000 people in attendance?

Fortunately the adjacent Robson Square Theatre was able to accommodate everyone who wanted to hear the Fringe Group give the North American premiere of John Cage's long-lost yet quite contemporary-sounding Dance Music for Elfrid Ide , along with his wacky and kinetic percussion score, Third Construction . The Fringe players–augmented on occasion by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra principal percussionist Vern Griffiths and pianist Marguerite Witvoet–were especially masterful on the late John Wyre's Marubatoo , a dreamy respite from the madness upstairs. And it's always a pleasure to hear Cage, especially at midnight and in the company of 300 other attentive listeners.

Anyone who thinks that Vancouver audiences have no appetite for modern art is clearly wrong–and that's the message this FUSE success sends loud and clear.