Amanda Acorn
Artist
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice includes somatic movement, improvisation, writing, and drawing as tools to explore the body as an empathetic and malleable system, wired for attunement.
As a dancer, she performed in and collaborated on projects as a company dancer with Dancemakers (2011-2016) and independently with choreographers such as Dana Michel (QC), Isabel Lewis (DE), Lemi Ponifasio (NZ), Andrea Spaziani (CA) and Benjamin Kamino (CA) among others.
As a choreographer, she creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for shared, embodied exchange. Her latest project, no place (2022), explores the body in dialogue with the material world through emergent, relational practice and an evolving construction of space and place.
She graduated from the Canadian College of Performing Arts (2000) and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Training Program (2008) and pursued independent studies in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and Genoa, Italy. Her solo and group works have included presentations and commissions shared in diverse venues in Toronto including Toronto Dance Theatre, Videofag, The Citadel, Luminato Festival, among others, and across Canada at 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, Push Festival and Gold Saucer Studio in Vancouver.
She holds an MA from York University and is studying Gestalt Psychotherapy at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.
Adaptation Project
Michael Trent’s response to choreographer Mitchell Rose’s 1974 Following Station Identification
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Apr 19, 2012 – Apr 29, 2012
Love Loss
In loveloss, Michael Trent mines personal experience, investigating the bodily affects of love and loss.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Feb 17, 2013 – Feb 24, 2013
Hi-Fi: Rumschpringe
In response to Lo-Fi in 2012, Michael Trent has relinquished his fall season and handed it over, along with all the authority, to the resident company dancers.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Nov 18, 2013 – Nov 24, 2013
Around
Celebrating Dancemakers 40th anniversary, this new work mines all the ways we encounter ourselves and others in our pursuit of being human.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Mar 26, 2014 – Apr 6, 2014
Leisure Palace
A site responsive, immersive installation that floats between pulsing party and minimalist dreamscape.
Ontario Place – West Island
Sep 15, 2016 – Sep 25, 2016
Multiform(s)
A vibrant, moving tableau inspired by the vivid pigments of Mark Rothko’s paintings.
The Music Gallery
Mar 9, 2018 – Mar 10, 2018
Soil Study
Soil Study is an ongoing series of discursive experiments, processes, interventions and conversations between the human body and soil memory.
High Park
May 30, 2026 – May 31, 2026
1976, have several
1976, have several by DANA MICHEL Over her first four weeks in residence, Dana Michel has worked with the artistic team at Dancemakers to revisit, transmit, and blow apart 1976 – making a group piece from the rubble.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Jan 28, 2015 – Jan 31, 2015