Toronto Dance Theatre Reveals 2024/25 Season Lineup

 Toronto Dance Theatre has announced a wide-ranging and kinetic programming line-up for 2024/25 that sees the company expand beyond the walls of the historic 80 Winchester Street Theatre, with a season that explores site specific work, durational performance, and interconnectivity.  
 
Building upon the successes of the last two seasons, the TDT 2024/25 season brings back an audience favourite, introduces new work and new company members, and includes major partnerships with Nuit Blanche, the Toronto Biennial, and The Bentway, as well as resumption of touring.
 
“This season at TDT, you’ll notice the overarching themes of site, duration and interconnectivity running through all of the programming,” says Artistic Director Andrew Tay. “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.”
 
The season unfolds in early October with a major presentation in partnership with Nuit Blanche Toronto, Coalescing Towards from Italian choreographer Michele Rizzo. An international partnership, Coalescing Towards is a 12-hour durational performance set within a unique industrial space near Toronto's waterfront.  Revealing the concealed, yet dynamic space surrounding emotions like ecstasy, euphoria and anticipation, Coalescing Towards 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, this one time only performance featuring 15 dancers runs from October 5 at dusk to October 6 at dawn.
 
A Milan-based choreographer whose work explores processes of transformation and transcendence, Michele Rizzo’s piece 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. 
 
The Mainstage season gets underway in November with a remount of the audience hit The Magic of Assembly by Ashley ‘Colours’ Perez with Andrew Tay and LAL.  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. A choreographic dialogue between Street Dance and Punking/Whacking artist Ashley ‘Colours’ Perez and TDT Artistic Director Andrew Tay, The Magic of Assembly blends elements of Punking/Whacking and unapologetically queer performance and 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. 
 
Later in November, TDT resumes collaboration with visual artist Ness Lee for a new performance work featuring the company ensemble, presented as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art program Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry curated by Jenn Goodwin.
This durational event will be performed on November 23rd, November 27th, and December 1st, 2024, at 32 Lisgar Street.
 
Following an initial collaboration during the Performance Clash in 2020, TDT and Ness Lee have 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.
 
A Toronto based artist whose work 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, Ness Lee has been shown in institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Gardiner Museum, the  Art Gallery of Hamilton, as well as galleries in New York, Los Angeles, India, Mexico, Tokyo, and Taiwan. 
 
Back at the Winchester in the new year, TDT presents a new performance project led by Affiliate Artist Aisha Sasha John featuring the company ensemble, The Pool. Across three distinct suites, The Pool celebrates the patterns that emerge in a group body as its individual members perform varying qualities and degrees of agency. 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.
 
In June 2025, TDT, in partnership with The Bentway, will premiere a site-specific dance piece that engages with The Bentway’s unique location under the Gardiner. 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 public performances. More details and artistic team to be announced soon.
 
Also in June, TDT is thrilled to bring an expanded version of Fran Chudnoff’s FACE RIDER, which first premiered at TDT in the 2023/24 season, to the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels). Created by 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 played to sold out houses and rave reviews at TDT's Winter Double Bill in February 2024. 
 
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 or call 416-967-1365, x123.
 

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