Short&Sweet: Toronto Edition

Friday July 8 at The Great Hall
Begins at 8:30 p.m. ET
This is a 19+ event
Tickets: $15 The Great Hall, 1087 Queen St. W. (VIEW MAP)

Accessibility Info: Event will be presented with Deaf / ASL Interpretation.
The Great Hall is a fully accessible building.

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Get ready for the dance party of the summer!

We are bringing a live edition of Andrew Tay and Sasha Kleinplatz’s iconic performance party to Toronto for the first time. Taking place at The Great Hall, Short&Sweet features a roster of artists from an eclectic range of styles and aesthetics. All have the freedom to create whatever they want, as long as it is under three minutes in length! A timekeeper is present and if any artist goes over the allotted time frame, they will be cut off immediately.

See 25 dances that end quickly… featuring artists:
Aisha Nicholson and Cheryl Chan, Alyssa Martin, Amanda Acorn, b solomon, CM² (Chantelle Mostacho and Caden MacKinnon), Darryl Tracy, Fran Chudnoff, jes sachse, Juju Guru, Kate Hilliard and Alana Elmer, Kaelin Isserlin, Lia Grainger, lo bil, Marcus “OG” Paris, Meryem Alaoui, MustBeFABY, Nova Bhattacharya, Nyda Kwasowsky, Raoul “Jiggyman” Wilke, Ravyn Wngz, Syreeta Hector, Tygr Willy, Veronica Simpson, and Victoria Mata.

Join the summer fun and witness these artists try something new, take risks, and question what can be accomplished in 3 minutes. Following these enthralling performances, the night will wrap up with a wild dance party!

Media release disclaimer: A photographer and videographer will be capturing the event. Booking a ticket grants permission for TDT and authorized representatives to use photos or videos that may include you on their website, social media platforms, or within printed marketing materials. If you have any questions, you may email info@tdt.org or speak to TDT’s front-of-house staff upon arrival.

COVID-19 Protocols Update

As of June 1, 2022, audiences are no longer required to show proof of full vaccination when attending events, and face masks will be optional. Visit our COVID-19 webpage for full details.

Venue Accessibility & Parking

A historic Victorian-style venue, The Great Hall is a fully accessible building. There is an elevator between the lower floor and second floor of the building. Accessible washrooms are located on both the lower level and the second floor. The Great Hall’s full AODA policy.

If driving to the event, there are multiple parking lot options around The Great Hall off of Queen Street West. Click here to see their Parking Map.

Artists

Photo by Talia Shipman

Amanda Acorn

Amanda Acorn is a choreographer and artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. She creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for shared embodied exchange. Her newest group work, no place, explores the body in dialogue with the material world through emergent, relational practice and an evolving construction of space and place. She is a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Traning Program. Her work has been presented in venues throughout Toronto including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Citadel, Videofag, Toronto Dance Theatre, Summerworks Festival, The Music Gallery and many site-specific locations in collaboration with ArtSpin. She has toured her work at festivals and venues across Canada including the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, Workers Arts Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Festival of New Dance in St John’s, Dancer’s Studio West in Calgary, as well as the Push Festival and Gold Saucer Studio in Vancouver. Amanda is a passionate facilitator of movement and works to build spaces for care through the intersections of her art practice and her work as a movement guide, teaching contemporary technique, improvisation and Pilates. She is furthering her study of the dialogue between bodies through an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University as well as the practice of Gestalt Psychotherapy through the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.

Photo by Johann Louw

lo bil

lo bil (she-her) is a Toronto-based second-generation-settler and queer performance artist who experiments with making once-performed risky-heart performances involving spontaneous utterance, impulse-based scores and inter-relational proposals with audience. lo has performed 7a*11d, AGO First Thursdays, Luminato online, Rhubarb!, Summerworks, Fringe, Nuit Blanche, Duration & Dialogue, p.s. We Are All Here, LADA DIY (UK), Pi*llOry and at academic conferences in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Chicago, Mexico City, Vienna and Amsterdam. lo is a Kathy Acker award recipient.

Photo provided by artist

Nova Bhattacharya

Nova Bhattacharya is an award-winning artist and cultural leader based in Tkaronto, and the Founding Artistic Director of Nova Dance. Crafting vivid images that invite the viewer on a journey of heart and mind, integrating improvised movement and gesture, she invents a language that needs no translation. Dancing solos that are intimate and intense, she reinterprets traditions through a diaspora lens to tell new stories with movement. In September of 2022 her new work Svāhā! will be presented by TO Live at The Bluma Appel Theatre.

Photo provided by artist

Cheryl Chan

Cheryl Chan graduated from the George Brown Dance Performance Studies Program and studied a year at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She is in her sixth season with KasheDance, having toured multiple works throughout the Caribbean, Canada & USA. Cheryl has performed for the Pan Am Games, SummerWorks Festival & Nuit Blanche among other festivals. She has also performed with other companies like Little Pear Garden Dance Company, The Chimera Project, The Parahumans, Impromptu Movements, and has just presented her first co-work in progress with MC².

Photo by Krista Newey

Fran Chudnoff

Fran also known as Franz (she/they), is a Tkaronto based millennial, with a BFA in performance, and paying rent as a multidisciplinary artist. She is a dance maker, video artist, and photographer who is slowly learning digital illustration & 3D modelling. Their work is in conversation with internet aesthetics and shaping a “social aura”. Franz recently completed a 3 year research residency at Dancemakers Centre for Creation with Driftnote where together they created “FACE RIDER”

Photo by Bri Mapson

CM²

CM² is an artistic collaboration composed of Chantelle Mostacho and Caden MacKinnon.

Their dance influences and training draw from a multitude of styles including popping, animation, contemporary and waacking.

While they are highly regarded as soloists, their uniqueness truly shines in their boundary pushing approach to contact improvisation.

Select credits include Cadence Weapon, Bassnectar, Unity Charity, Moments of Movement, 2U4U, TUDS, and Lost is Found.

Photo by McKenzie James Photography

Alana Elmer

Alana Elmer grew up on a farm, attended The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and has worked with the Toronto Dance Theatre company for over 15 years. Captivated by the power of framework and the music of the body, Alana is in constant examination of the lenses the performer and choreographer use to shape things, and how we engage with one another as we shape them -choreography as a way to mobilize questions, and questions as active ways to embody and connect, to reflect internally and externally. She continues to deepen and refine her somatic practice. Alana is a costume designer and the star of the short film Latched, which had its world premiere at TIFF 2017 and has won over 65 awards world wide. Her debut feature film Making Monsters was released September 2019 and has already won multiple awards including Best Horror Film at Shriekfestfestival run.

Photo by Rodrigo Vasquez

Lia Grainger

Lia Grainger is a Toronto-based flamenco dancer and choreographer. She has toured internationally with her ensemble, Fin de Fiesta Flamenco, and now performs with the global music and dance ensemble, Qairo, which she co-founded in 2020 with French singer Alejandro Mendia. Her new theatrical dance production, “La Forastera,” will premiere at Factory Theatre in Toronto this September 8-11.

Photo by David Leyes

Syreeta Hector

Syreeta Hector is a dance artist and educator in Toronto, Ontario. As a highly accomplished performer, Syreeta has worked for internationally recognized companies like Adelheid Dance Projects, Danny Grossman Dance Company, Political Movement, and Toronto Dance Theatre. She is a proud graduate of The National Ballet School’s Teacher Training Program, The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and has achieved her Master of Arts in Dance Studies from York University.

Her work called “Black Ballerina” focuses on the dualities within ones identity, along with Syreeta’s blackness and indigeneity in relationship to classical ballet. The development of the full length version of “Black Ballerina” is taking place through the support of the Citadel+ Compagnie, Canadian Stage, and the Kaaitheater. Syreeta is currently one of the Luminato Artists in Residence for the 2020-2021 season.

Photo by Sean Rees

Kate Hilliard

Kate Hilliard (she/her) is an artist, curator, educator, and mother. Her performance research blends gestural movement language with improvisation, spoken word, writing, and digital media. Kate’s choreography has been commissioned and presented in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Germany. In 2020, she was nominated for The Dora Mavor Moore Award for “Best Original Choreography”. Hilliard is Creative Director for Orillia Centre for Arts + Culture and faculty at Toronto Metropolitan University. She studied Art History at The University of Toronto and holds an MFA from Transart Institute. https://katehilliard.net/

Photo by Kirk Lisaj

Kaeline Isserlin

Kaelin Isserlin is a dancer, performer, community organizer, movement artist and graduate of STDT in 2020. Based in what is colonially known as Toronto, their work explore physical/theatrical storytelling, abstracting the body, and queerness as protest. Under the guise of an OVERSIZE LOAD, Isserlin produces theatre/film work and collaborates with friends in a project titled ‘blank space’, an offering of space for artists to share their individual practices with collaborators, friends and strangers.

Photo by Henry Chan

Nyda Kwasowsky

Nyda Kwasowsky a freelance dance artist, interpreter, performer and emerging choreographer based out of Tsi Tkaronto. Their language is the moving body and their practice is used as a tool for healing. ‘This body has the role of remembering, dance as the action that collects us.’ Her work centers around loss, grief and belonging in diasporic experience. Transforming memories and histories from colonial supremacies. Studied in trauma informed practices and somatics. Choosing to work with non-definitive synesthetic relationships as an opportunity to form connections that push at the boundaries of who and what we can be together.

Photo by Zahra Saleki

Victoria Mata

Victoria Mata Venezuelan-Canadian settler in T’Koronto. Poly-lingual choreographer, dance artist and activist with a background in expressive arts therapy. Mata’s career was first sculpted by pedagogic, self-directed training, which proceeded with training under internationally renowned choreographers. Mata’s sensibility to inclusion and border stories is due to her eclectic upbringing in three continents before the age of fifteen. Mata’s intimate, dynamic and visceral aesthetic is rooted in traditional Venezuelan dance genres reframed through contemporary expressions. Intersectional, multi-framed community-arts and the abolishment of violence against women are some of Mata’s passion. She has intricately weaved these themes in her MFA in Contemporary Choreography and is the foundation for some of her recognitions such as being a recipient of the Metcalf Foundation, a finalist of the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 7 Dora nominations. Mata deeply believes in the arts as a core and tangible mode of sustaining and transforming the paradigms of oppressive tropes to populate a sphere of discourse, play, exploration and possibility.

Photo by Drew Berry

Alyssa Martin

Alyssa Martin (she/her) is a choreographer and director based in Tkaronto. She’s working on using a new absurdist approach to bake wonky imaginative coping mechanisms into psychedelic contemporary spectacle. Determined to help blur the distinctions of dance and theatre, she founded a company called Rock Bottom Movement in 2012 alongside friends/collaborators. Outside of Rock Bottom, Alyssa has choreographed for Toronto Dance Theatre, The Stratford Festival, Tarragon Theatre, Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre as well as with many post-secondary dance programs, and in residence at many arts centres. She has the pleasure of collaborating as a director, choreographer and movement director in dance, theatre, musical theatre, opera and film.

Photo by Dahlia Katz

MustBeFABY

My name is MustBeFABY because it must be Faby! I’m a multi-disciplinary creative and choreographer. I love doing a little bit of everything! I feel, “Why not?” I’m just responding, I’m being authentic and I’m just listening to my needs in terms of expression. I’ve been so lucky to have the means to express myself and not wait in the corner for years. So… When you see me, don’t be shy to twist in my world 🙂

Photo by Michael Mortley

Aisha Nicholson

Aisha Nicholson hails from Toronto; creator of the Movement CheckIn a program that brings artist together on Instagram live. Aisha has worked with choreographers and companies such as Arsenio Andrade, C.O.B.A (Collective Of Black Artist), Garth Fagan, Aria Evans and KasheDance to name a few. Aisha has performed in Obeah Opera for the Luminato festival, the Carifesta XIV festival in Trinidad and Tobago and in 2020 she Choreographed her first inaugural solo called Abandonment.

Photo by Kadeem Ellis

Marcus "OG" Paris

Marcus “OG” Paris (he/him) is a Toronto-bred artist/dancer who involved himself in multiple dance communities such as Hip Hop and Dancehall, but during his teenage years, he discovered Krump. In the 14 years of learning, engaging, and spreading the movement of Krump in the City of Toronto, the Co-Founder of “The Jungle” and “Jungle Bros” which is an all-inclusive platform that uses Krump and creative arts as a means for self-care. Marcus has contributed to creating an inclusive, supportive, and caring community for those within it and who want to learn about it. Marcus hopes to continue to grow and attain the knowledge needed so that he can continue to spread the powerful message of Krump as a self-care practice for youth, teens, and adults.

Photo by Yuula Benivolski

jes sachse

Presently living in Tkaronto, jes sachse is an artist, writer and dancer who addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care. Often found marrying poetry with large scale sculptural forms, their work has been presented and supported by Dancemakers, the Centre de Création et Recherche O Vertigo (Montréal), Harbourfront Centre, among other centres. Their work has appeared in and been profiled by NOW Magazine, The Peak, Canadian Art, C Magazine, CV2 -The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada, and the 40th Anniversary Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Photo by Sam Gaetz

Veronica Simpson

Veronica Simpson is a dancer and theatre artist in Toronto. She has performed as a soloist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and as a member of tap company Rhythm and Sound. In 2021, Veronica joined the Tap Performance Ensemble at the School at Jacob’s Pillow, then continued her work as a swing on TimeSpell at New York City Center. Most recently, she co-founded a new tap dance collective called Boys’ Club whose first work was developed at tanzhaus nrw in Germany.

Photo by Yvonne Chew

b solomon

Multi-award nominated, winner and loser, creator b solomon is of mixed Anishinaabe and Irish heritage, born in Shebahonaning on the North Channel of Lake Huron. As a creator his multidisciplinary work is raw, challenging and full of spirit. His commissions (dance, visual & media arts) have been presented and toured across Turtle Island and abroad. With social advocacy at the core, he is passionate about helping people relearn the nature of their ancient bodies, and take back the space those bodies occupy. More at: electricmoose.ca

Photo by Lesandra Dodson

Darryl Tracy

Darryl Tracy is a Toronto based artist who loves the human body. He is involved in dance, choreography, movement facilitation and teaching. He has performed with many Canadian and European choreographers over the last 25 years and has also created 42 works through commissions and self-productions. He is a neurological rehabilitation physiotherapist in Toronto. Upcoming, is a new creation and teaching gig through Ecole de danse contemporain du Montreal (Aug/Sept 2022)

Photo by Devroñe

Raoul “Jiggyman” Wilke

Raoul Wilke, a multifaceted Dora Award winning artist, is the co-founder of The Moon Runners dance crew and the CEO of FeedYourSole. His choreographic work extends into film and theatre, artistic directing and coaching for artists such as Dillion Anthony’s “Love That We Found, Tyra Jutai’s “New Shoes” and Abhithi’s cover of “7 Rings “.

Under the artistic direction of Gadfly Dance Company, he got to perform for major brands such as Canada Goose, Azzaro Fragrance as well as grant commissioned works, at the Four Seasons, The Sony Center and many other Canadian based venues. As a black emerging artist, he’s accolades within these different communities opened doors for new collaborations.

He was a model for Seika Boye’s “This Living Dancer” in collaboration with the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). He performed for The Raptors half time show, as well got to produce his own film over the summer of 2019, commissioned by Canadian Stage Theatre. As a leader of street dance community within Canada, he has mentored various companies and dance schools over the years, on the importance of the historical context, within these vernacular street forms and the value of themselves. He has represented Canada internationally battling at world renowned competitions, with his biggest accomplishment to date, representing Team Canada In China, for KOD in 2018.

Raoul is currently Faculty at Ryerson Dance School, educating students on these vernacular dance forms that helped shape him in to the man he is today. As a student of dance, he continues to live by the quote, “See the music, Hear the Dance” by Balanchine

Photo by Nick Merzetti

Tygr Willy

Toronto’s Them Fatale leaving you tongue ty’d, Tygr Willy is a Draglesque performer, producer and host. Recently featured in two episodes of CraveTV’s Season 1 of ‘1 Queen 5 Queers’, and VICE’s Take Care ‘Exploring the Mental Health Journeys of Young Asian-Canadians’ Docuseries, they are consistently threading sexy, queerness and the art of tease to satiate’s everyone’s taste. Producer of Thirst Nation, Colour Me Now, Passion Fruit, and will also coordinate a performance program; It’s All Queer Pride, launching for a fourth cycle this July.

Photo by Jackie Brown

Ravyn Wngz

Ravyn Wngz “The Black Widow of Burlesque” is a Tanzanian, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent empowerment storyteller. Ravyn is an abolitionist and co-founder of ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company, Black Lives Matter Canada, & the Wildseed Centre for Arts & Activism, Ravyn is committed to eradicating all forms of anti-Black racism, settler colonialism systems of oppression while nurturing Black and Indigenous healing in communities.