DanceHouse Sets Canadian Premieres & More for 2024/25 Season

DanceHouse has revealed its 2024/25 season of performances from around the globe – on Vancouver stages from October 2024 through April 2025. Six diverse companies and choreographers bring an eclectic mix of experiences whose scope includes contemporary dance, tango, circus, ice skating, live music, and more. DanceHouse’s 17th season includes two Canadian premieres, three BC premieres, one Canadian company debut, and the return of an all-time DanceHouse audience favourite. It also boasts the addition of matinee performances offering further accessibility, as well as new season ticket pricing for youth and families.
 

“After 16 years of challenging our audience’s conceptions and definitions of dance, the season ahead pushes our programming – and ourselves – further than we’ve ever gone before,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “Minds will be expanded, bent, and blown with the diverse array of programming we’ve scoured the globe to assemble. We cannot wait to share these eclectic experiences with our longtime audiences – and to welcome adventurous new art lovers into the fold.”

The 2024/25 DanceHouse Season includes:
 

Social Tango Project – Agustina Videla (Argentina)

October 24-26, 2024 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse 

BC Premiere

A shy and hesitant woman takes a step into a new world and is swept off her feet by the seductive, sinuous dance form known as tango. Her journey is brought to vibrant life by live musicians and accompanying singer, along with evocative multimedia projections.

Choreographer Agustina Videla invites dance lovers to experience an evening of rhythmic, immersive dance, aiming to share the value of social dance, and inspire individuals to join the dance floor.

Social Tango Project offers a place for spontaneous eruptions of music and joy, transforming the venue into a timeless place where the past and present sidle up to each other in an evocative mix of reverberating symmetry and silken melancholy.
 

The Pretty Things (Les jolies choses) – Compagnie Catherine Gaudet (Montreal)

November 22 & 23, 2024 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse 

BC Premiere

The beauty of endurance, of exhaustion, of bodies beleaguered and sodden with effort, but still somehow continuing is the raw material of Catherine Gaudet. The Montreal choreographer’s work presents the body as a contested site, a place of divergent, often contradictory demands.

In The Pretty Things (Les jolies choses), this fascination with physicality evolves into choreographic work that operates almost on a subconscious level. The body itself, pummeled and punished by the demands of late-stage capitalism becomes the spectacle. As the gaudy stuff of cheap entertainment falls away, a new species of liberation, conceived at the far edge of possibility, is born.
 

Duck Pond – Circa (Australia)

Co-presented with The Cultch
January 22-25, 2025 at 8pm and January 25 at 2pm | Vancouver Playhouse

North American Premiere

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes Duck Pond, Circa’s irreverent take on the timeworn classic Swan Lake. Under the visionary direction of choreographer Yaron Lifschitz, Circa mixes it up, throwing in burlesque, heart-in-throat acrobatics, romance, and more than a little madness and mayhem to create a frothy frolicsome concoction.

In this ten-car pile-up, elements of Tchaikovsky’s iconic ballet and Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved parable The Ugly Duckling leap headlong into the pool together, sending up a giddy splash. Fairy tale conventions go sailing out the window as the performers leap, tumble, and proffer topsy-turvy takes on the roles of pining prince, BLACK SWAN, and an army of yellow billed duck-dancers in sequinned flippers. The result is a blaze of loopy, spinning, ass-over-teakettle joy, glittering with theatrical magic, laughter, and a zippy new take on happily ever after.
 

The City of Others (La Ciudad de los Otros) – Sankofa Danzafro (Colombia)

February 21 & 22, 2025 at 8pm and February 22 at 2pm | Vancouver Playhouse

Canadian Premiere

In The City of Others (La Ciudad de los Otros), twelve dancers and musicians occupy the stage, laying claim to political and social power, reconstituting it as a site of democracy, equality, and wholeness. Created in celebration of Colombia’s 159th Anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery, this Canadian premiere takes apart the country’s history and culture to examine its complex and often agonizing past. 

Colombia boasts the second largest Afro-descent population in Latin America. For thousands of people, cities can be a place of hostility, loneliness, and discrimination. For life to be positive and constructive for collective communities, it is necessary to embrace the extended family concept prevalent in rural communities: what I own is for everyone; under my roof, there is room for someone else.

Colombia’s leading contemporary dance company, Sankofa Danzafro was founded by choreographer Rafael Palacios in 1997 to focus on Afro-Colombian and contemporary dance forms. Committed to the principles of social justice and representation, the company uses dance to advocate for the empowerment of marginalized people.
 

Murmuration – Le Patin Libre (Montreal)

March 20-23, 2025 at 7:30pm and March 22 and 23 at 2pm | Kerrisdale Cyclone Taylor Arena

BC Premiere

Inspired by the aerial choreography of birds, Le Patin Libre’s Murmuration transposes the swoops, swirls, and configurations of mass flight to the ice. Complex algorithms, infused and emboldened with meticulous choreography, become an aeriform ballet, tinged with risk, yet mesmerizing in its beauty and razored precision. 

As the performers mimic the movements of creatures fully in sync, the line between individuals and the collective blurs, then disappears. To fully embody this phenomenon, Le Patin Libre sought out the world’s most highly skilled skaters through a series of international auditions. This group of virtuoso performers from seven different countries, becomes a living plurality, moving together with instinctual ease – the very incarnation of grouped flight and epic grace.
 

Diptych (The Missing Door and The Lost Room) – Peeping Tom (Belgium)

April 24-26, 2025 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse

Canadian Premiere

Making their Canadian debut, the Belgium-based Peeping Tom obliterates the border between theatre and dance, roping together a hyperrealist aesthetic with real-world settings to fashion a disquieting mix of performance genres.

Recalling the shifting surrealism of filmmaker David Lynch, the paired works of Diptych bring together a collection of odd and archetypal individuals, subjecting them to a corkscrew journey of extraordinary proportions and increasingly bizarre scenarios. As the fabric of the psyche begins to snag and fray, the story shapeshifts in real time, peeling back the layers of theatrical convention to pose unsettling questions about the very nature of reality.
 

Subscriptions are on sale April 19, single tickets are on sale May 28. For tickets and further information, visit: dancehouse.ca
 

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