Luminato, 2016 edition, installed itself in the derelict Hearn Generating Station, a hulking industrial husk left for dead decades before.

Reanimated for the festival’s 10 days, it presented a tantalizing challenge to the city and Luminato both: What are the blue-sky limits of urban revitalization and what would the festival do for an encore?

Luminato revealed its answer Thursday, as it released the top line of its programming for its 2017 edition, which opens June 14. The Hearn is back in mothballs and the festival resituates on David Pecaut Square, named for its late co-founder, who died in 2009.

Anthony Sargent, the festival’s CEO, sees it less as retrenchment than a homecoming and a pivot point. If the Hearn offered a spectacle befitting the festival’s 10th anniversary — the apex, perhaps, of former artistic director Jorn Weisbrodt’s lofty ambitions — the return downtown is a symbolic gesture of what’s to come.

“This is a for-instance, rather than a finished thing,” Sargent said this week. “I’m very proud of what we’re doing this year; I think the audiences will love it and the artists will find it very rewarding. But I’m also terribly conscious that it’s a journey. I think this year is a good statement of intent — that’s how I’m seeing it.”

Sargent, a seasoned arts executive recruited from the U.K. to replace longtime CEO Janice Price in 2015, was met shortly after his arrival with the resignation of Weisbrodt, the festival’s emblematic artistic director. After stewarding the festival to the Hearn, Weisbrodt left, handing the task of what the next 10 years of the festival might look like to Sargent.

His first order of business was to bring in Josephine Ridge as artistic director, who was then tasked with assembling this year’s edition in a little more than a year. With the change also came the opportunity to reconsider what Luminato should be. Under Weisbrodt, Luminato had become a platform of international spectacles and marquee names: David Byrne’s stadium-filling Contemporary Color, a multi-pronged presentation of the work of iconic performance artist Marina Abramovic.

At the same time, it began to feel a little distant from its place and time. When Weisbrodt left, Sargent and Ridge began to devise a very different Luminato.

“Josephine always talks about how this should be a festival of Toronto, not a festival in Toronto, and I think that’s a very neat characterization of what we’re trying to do,” Sargent says. “That’s one of the things I’m most proud of: finding ways to do things in collaboration with other people involved in the arts in Canada; perhaps that hasn’t been as much of a focus of the past two or three years.”

To that point, this year’s festival focuses on collaborations, with the Theatre Centre and Directors Lab North, to name a couple, and a deeper commitment to the city, and the country, itself.

“I think where you once had a festival characterized with very ambitious things with a lot of resources put behind them — and I don’t think it unkind to say, perhaps at the expense of other programming — you’ll have a festival with a lot of different entry points for other parts of the community,” Sargent said.

At the same time, the festival is hard at work on a new business plan that Sargent hopes will resonate with city, provincial and federal governments equally. Born of a $15-million grant in 2007 from the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Luminato was weaned down to a $2.5-million annual commitment from the province that expired last year.

That means some creative thinking going forward for a festival whose operating cost has landed between $10 and $11 million the past two years, Sargent says, though Luminato’s reputation precedes it. “Coming from abroad, I’ve seen the reputation of this festival globally, and Luminato and TIFF are the two brightest lights for this city around the world that this city has.

“Because we’re an international festival, we get a lot of international curators coming here and we can show them great Canadian work. That’s the dialogue I’ve been having with the feds: the thought that we have global promotional capital for some of the most exciting things happening in the arts in Canada today. That’s exactly how a festival like this should be used.”

Some highlights of Luminato 2017:

Opening Night: It will feature Tributaries, a loose, expansive performance of contemporary indigenous music and dance in David Pecaut Square. Produced by Denise Bolduc and Erika Iserhoff of Native Women in the Arts, the event pays tribute to the land’s original residents.

The Famous Spiegeltent: A return, or at least a reprise, of the festival’s inaugural year, the Spiegeltent, pitched at Harbourfront in 2007, moves to David Pecaut Square with a nightly program of performances to include music, theatre, cabaret and spoken word.

King Arthur’s Night: A festival commission, this musical theatre piece makes its world premiere here, featuring a cast “living with and without” Down’s syndrome. Its score was composed by Canadian singer-songwriter Veda Hille. (June 15 to 18)

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Bearing: A world premiere dance opera, by Plains Cree choreographer Michael Greyeyes and Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan, Bearing takes on the catastrophic history of the abusive Canadian residential school system, when indigenous children were taken from their families to be stripped of their language and culture at faraway schools. With librettist Spy Denommé-Welch. (June 22 to 24)

En avant, marche! With 40 performers, this work from Belgian choreographer Alain Platel presents a crowded stage and a “tragicomedy” about the power — and no doubt, the tribulations — of collaboration. (June 21 to 24)

Vertical Influences: Stretching the boundaries of bona fide culture, Vertical Influences, the product of Montreal collective Le Patin Libre (The Free Skate) puts audience members in the middle of a sheet of ice as the group’s hybrid speed-skaters/breakdancers wing by at breakneck speed. Helmet recommended? (June 22 to 23 at Ryerson’s Mattamy Athletic Centre and June 24 to 25 at Don Montgomery Arena in Scarborough)