August 28, 2024
2024/25 Season is HERE!
TDT presents a dynamic 2024/25 Season
SITE | INTERCONNECTIVITY | DURATION
Today we are thrilled to unveil a wide-ranging and kinetic programming line-up for the new season that sees the company expand beyond the walls of the Winchester Street Theatre.
Building upon our recent successes, 2024/25 season brings back an audience favourite, introduces new work and new company members, and announces major partnerships with Nuit Blanche, the Toronto Biennial, and The Bentway.
This season at TDT, you’ll notice the overarching themes of site, duration and interconnectivity running through all of the programming. Multiple projects will interact with unique locations and environments outside of our theatre, and remounts of two recent productions will be performed outside the city for the first time since I arrived as Artistic Director. Choreographers this season are also asking audiences to sit with specific ideas of time, manifested in part, through durational performances that break away from traditional concert dance formats.
Finally, all of the works for 24/25 are interested in the idea of collectivity and the collective body, and how to connect to each other through performance. This is reflected in the many artistic collaborations and partnerships in the community we have cultivated which I see as an important statement on how to support each other during these challenging times where the cultural landscape is in a process of great change – demonstrating that by working together we can realize artistic ideas in ways not possible if we were to do things individually.
Artistic Director, Andrew Tay
2024/25 Season at a Glance
The Magic of Assembly
A Toronto Dance Theatre mainstage presentation
Created by Ashley ‘Colours’ Perez, Andrew Tay, LAL
November 7-9, 2024 at the Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto
November 15, 2024 as part of CINARS Official Programming at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens – Studio-Théâtre, Montreal
Following five Dora nominations, including best Outstanding Production in 2023, TDT remounts The Magic of Assembly with four performances in Toronto before embarking to Montreal for the international dance platform CINARS.
The Magic of Assembly is a choreographic dialogue between Street Dance and Punking/Whacking artist Ashley ‘Colours’ Perez and TDT Artistic Director Andrew Tay. Blending elements of Punking/Whacking and unapologetically queer performance, the work is set to an evocative electronic score by Polaris Prize-nominated duo LAL (Nicholas Murray and Rosina Kazi), who perform live alongside eight members of the TDT ensemble.
“Here, Toronto Dance Theatre continues to provide audiences and artists alike with a sense of belonging through inclusive yet profound dance performance.” – Intermission Magazine
Coalescing Towards
Presented by Nuit Blanche Toronto in partnership with TDT
Choreographed by Michele Rizzo (Milan)
October 5-6, 2024 from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM
Our first international partnership of the season, Coalescing Towards is a 12-hour durational performance set within a unique industrial space near Toronto’s waterfront. Choreographed by Italian Choreographer Michele Rizzo, this one time only performance featuring 15 dancers runs from October 5th at dusk to October 6th at dawn.
Coalescing Towards reveals the concealed, yet dynamic space surrounding emotions like ecstasy, euphoria and anticipation. The performance evolves through repeated sets of simple pedestrian movements, enacted in unison by groups of performers as they navigate their environment. A gradually intensifying dance performance investigating the concepts of repetition and unison, exploring the capacity for movement to forge togetherness.
Milan-based choreographer and visual artist Michele Rizzo’s work explores processes of transformation and transcendence. His work HIGHER has toured internationally since 2015 and the extended version HIGHER xtn was recently acquired to the Stedelijk Museum’s collection in Amsterdam. Since 2020 Rizzo has collaborated with fashion brands such as MARNI, Off-White, Magliano and Moschino.
“Watching Rizzo’s dancers explore their bodies, both individually and as a group, seemed like the most natural, and human, thing in the world.” – ArtReview
Ness Lee X TDT
Presented by the Toronto Biennial of Art
November 23, 27 and December 1, 2024
Free Public Presentation
TDT collaborates with well known Toronto visual artist Ness Lee on a new performance work featuring the company ensemble. This free durational event will be performed on November 23rd, November 27th and December 1st, 2024 at 32 Lisgar Street.
After their initial collaboration during the Performance Clash in 2020, TDT and Ness Lee come together to imagine a performance that will gently move through the Biennial exhibition space, with seven performers interacting with Lee’s distinctive sculptures and objects. Finding moments of intimacy between their bodies and the plush characters Ness creates, the dancers will animate the gallery through a tender parade, embodying the breath of space as a momentary feeling of one another.
Ness Lee draws upon the personal history and narratives of their diasporic cultural upbringing and the relationship to the body as a carrier of felt language and lived emotions. With these embodied experiences, Lee creates tender and surreal works that take shape in various mediums, spaces and realms of expression as an effort in seeking comfort, forgiveness and a desire for an end to a perpetual state.Their work has been featured in galleries and institutions in Canada as well as internationally in New York, Los Angeles, India, Mexico, Tokyo and Taiwan.
The Pool
A new performance project featuring the company ensemble
Created by Aisha Sasha John
February 19-22, 2025 Daytime presentations open to the public
March 5-8, 2025 Evening presentations open to the public
Pay-What-You-Can
Location: Winchester Street Theatre, 80 Winchester Street Toronto
The Pool considers the group body as the unit of expression across three distinct suites. The first suite is inspired by the movement patterns of groups of animals – pods, herds, schools, shoals. The second suite dances relationality, investigating the border between listening and expressing, hearing and heeding. In the third and final suite, percussion, juxtaposition and reflection create a foundation for the most beautiful breathing.
Aisha Sasha John is interested in choreographing performances that occasion real love. Her duet created with Devon Snell DIANA ROSS DREAM (Danse-cité) premiered in fall 2022 and has been programmed at Left of Main (Vancouver) and SPARK series (Studio 303 Montreal). Her first solo work the aisha of oz was presented at the Whitney Museum in 2017. A celebrated poet, John is the author of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize nominated collection, I have to live and is currently at work on her fourth collection, total.
A major international dance commission
Presented by The Bentway in partnership with TDT
June 2025
Public performances
Location: 250 Fort York Blvd, Toronto
TDT, in partnership with The Bentway, will premiere a site-specific dance piece that engages with The Bentway’s unique location under the Gardiner Express. This major work is created by a leading international choreographer whose work is understood as a format of speculative fiction that can propose complex and manyfold understandings of body, gender, species, ethnicity, knowledge and history. The project will culminate with 4 public performances in June. More details and artistic team to be announced soon.
FACE RIDER @ MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)
June 18-21, 2025
Location: 3680, rue Jeanne-Mance, Montréal (Québec)
Created by Fran Chudnoff in collaboration with multi-media artist Driftnote and fashion designer Angela Cabrera, FACE RIDER builds on the iconography of the hermit, the hog, and the himbo. The performance is a queer indie sleaze swamp dump celebrating gender deviance, glittery resurrection, and the chaotic joy of togetherness. It reimagines the unsettling nature of aspirational imagery through the gloomy melodies of midwest emo, confessional lyrics, and the aesthetics of the unresolvable mundane.
“It’s shocking and original in its aesthetics, it’s layered and intentional in its cultural references, and it’s entertaining as hell.” – Intermission Magazine
Residencies and Support Programs for Artists in the Community
Beyond performances with the company ensemble, TDT continues its commitment to supporting artists in their practice and career development with programs that provide space at the Winchester Street Theatre to a diverse spectrum of artists and perspectives, for creating work.
In the fall and spring, TDT again offers artists the opportunity to showcase 10 minutes of new material with the works-in-progress series, EYES ON BEGINNINGS. Audiences can play a role in the development process while discovering nascent creative propositions and artists benefit from facilitated audience feedback sessions.
The PILOT EPISODES residency program returns for a fifth iteration, in which six choreographers or creators will have their first experience collaborating with TDT company dancers during an immersive, one-week residency in the spring. TDT also brings back their popular PLUG-N-PLAY RESIDENCIES, which consist of week-long, half-day residencies in the studio free-of-charge. The call for artists will be launched in September, inviting choreographers and creators in body-centered practices to apply for free studio time. This program provides artists with an opportunity to deepen their ideas and experiment with collaborators in TDT’s studios.
New this year, TDT is happy to announce a new partnership with CanAsian Dance. EntryWaves is a pilot project offering free rehearsal space through six residencies in the Fall season – open to any artist who identifies as being from the Asian Diaspora.
TDT also welcomes two project specific residencies this season, From The Back, a tri-city kiki ball initiative that connects vogue and ballroom scenes across Canada, facilitated by Danah Rosales, and Niswa, a new full-length choreographic creation by Meryem Alaoui, of Jasad Dance Projects, featuring female performers from the Middle East and North Africa.
Tickets will become available for programming as relevant, in the weeks to come. Ensuring that cost is not a barrier, TDT remains committed to offering sliding scale pricing and pay-what-you-can for boundary-pushing contemporary dance, live performance and like-minded activities.
For more information, visit www.tdt.org (http://www.tdt.org/) or call 416-967-1365, x123.
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Media contact:
Suzanne Cheriton, Red Eye Media, suzanne@redeyemedia.ca (mailto:suzanne@redeyemedia.ca)