2025/26 Season
Scroll down or click below to see an overview of performances!
DanceWorks’ 2025/26 Signature Series will feature highly acclaimed performances from celebrated artists including three Toronto premieres and three world premieres. Our Signature Series features diverse double-bills, collaborative curatorial projects, and partnerships that invite the public to encounter distinct expressions of performance as we continue centering racialized, queer, and emerging choreographic voices in Canada. Platforming explorations of global indigeneity, intergenerational world building, and collective learning, we are excited to offer programming that bolsters cross-cultural knowledge exchange with a more action-based focus on accessibility and collaboration.
In alignment with our evolving curatorial vision and in response to the needs of the national cultural sector, the term ‘convergence’ has revealed a timely and vital orientation for the 2025/26 Season. The root word, converge, means “to come together and unite in a common interest or focus.” As we move through this next chapter, may we look to this term as a grounding reminder of the ever-present need to be attentive and present with the evolving socio-political landscape locally and beyond; continuing our investment in movement and cultural literacy amongst local and national audiences.
DanceWorks’ 2025/26 Signature Series was curated by Dedra McDermott and is made possible with collaborative co-presentation partners dance Immersion, SummerWorks, Dancemakers, and Toronto Dance Theatre.
Xilopango
Irma Villafuerte - South Of Your Feet
August 15-17, 2025
Co-presented with SummerWorks, as part of a Double Bill with Je ne vais pas inonder la mer. Featuring a new Access Partnership with VibraFusionLab.
-
Xilopango is a contemporary dance-theatre work by Salvadorian-Canadian choreographer Irma Villafuerte. Exploring intergenerational memory, migration, and matrilineal resilience through a Central American dance lens, Xilopango traces four generations of women impacted by war, colonization, and exile. An offering to reclaim fractured histories and honour the disappeared, amongst them her grandmother Juana Irma Cisneros Ticas.
Je ne vais pas inonder la mer
Sonia Bustos
August 15-17, 2025
Co-presented with SummerWorks, as part of a Double Bill with Xilopango. Featuring a new Access Partnership with VibraFusionLab.
-
Je ne vais pas inonder la mer (I Will Not Flood the Ocean) is a danced elegy with live music, an exercise in evocation through movement, that seeks to share emotional experience through an amplified presence of the five senses. Choreographed and performed by Sonia Bustos, the performance explores the mourning of her mother and grandmother, her identity, and her maternal lineage.
La Goddam Voie Lactée
MAYDAY | Mélanie Demers
October 24-25, 2025
Co-presented with dance Immersion and Dancemakers, as part of a Double Bill with Confession Publique
-
La Goddam Voie Lactée’s reaction to the harshness and asperity of the world is to offer up a pagan mass. A celebration in the form of a challenge. Drawing inspiration from the constant mourning that marks our current age, Mélanie Demers dives into a reflection on the theme of incompleteness. Each one is camped out at their own lookout post; sometimes they jump into the arena and grab hold of gestures, words, music, to drape around themselves like a costume. They sketch out their universe, drawing and erasing it. An aesthetic little Big Bang, La Goddam Voie Lactée is an exercise in self-imagination, a means of finding our bearings in this imperfect and infinite world which is our common belonging and inheritance.
Confession Publique
MAYDAY | Mélanie Demers
October 24-25, 2025
Co-presented with dance Immersion and Dancemakers, as part of a Double Bill with La Goddam Voie Lactée
-
Its title serving as a promise, Confession publique explores ambiguity and paradox, probes the noble and the vulgar, oscillates between grace and brutality. Choreographer Mélanie Demers turns her trusted collaborator Angélique Willkie into her muse. Together, these two kindred spirits explore the act of telling others about yourself without reserve. The result is a hard-hitting solo show, where anecdotes become painful secrets and the body reveals as much as words, if not more.
The Room Upstairs
Holla Jazz | Natasha Powell
April 29-May 2, 2026
Presented in partnership with Toronto Dance Theatre
-
The Room Upstairs is work inspired by and set to the music of John Coltrane. An ensemble work accompanied by live music that uses the dancing language of jazz, lindy hop, and black vernacular dances, The Room Upstairs is a world that holds space for devotion, camaraderie, and grief.
Peel Me
Eilish Shin-Culhane
June 18-20, 2026
Presented as part of Sweet Ephemera
-
Toeing the line between performance art and Western contemporary dance, Peel Me explores vignettes of control. Control over our own perception, our own future, our own intimacy. This experimental concert dance work has performers eating and destroying grapefruits and fortune cookies, leaning into mess, play, and heightened physicality to access catharsis and care.
pahinga ka muna
Jose Miguel 'Miggy' Esteban
June 18-20, 2026
Presented as part of Sweet Ephemera
-
pahinga ka muna, take a rest first. Returning to rest as a crip space of memory, dreaming, and worldmaking, Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban invites you to take part in an improvised ritual of mourning that traces the multi-sensorial mad and queer routes of their Filipinx diasporic inspirations.
Additionally, DanceWorks’ 2025/26 Season will include the continuation of our robust Education and Outreach programs, as well as new pilot projects and partnerships. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements specific to our Education and Outreach programming!
We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to each and every person who has contributed to DanceWorks’ iterative growth and development.
Thank you for your support, your questions, and your presence.
We look forward to welcoming you to our 2025/26 Season!
Photo Credits: Cloe Pluquet, Mathieu Doyon, Kevin Calixte, Francesca Chudnoff, David Wong, André Escobar-Linares, Kendra Epik, Kaylee McCullough, and Courtesy of CanAsian Dance and Toronto Dance Theatre.
Our 2025-26 Season is made possible through collaboration with the following partners:
