Dancemakers and FADO Performance Art Centre are teaming up in March 2025 for something we’re calling FUTURE DANCES. This is a speculative choreography project in which 8 artists have been tasked with creating a dance for 50 years into the future. We want to know, now, what dance might look like in 2074. What will happen to dance, choreography and stops in between over the next two generations.

This is a thought experiment and a real exercise that considers what the role, purpose, form and potential of dance (as well as performance, choreography, movement, or adjacent and related forms such as performance art) might be at this critical convergence of the climate crisis, violent international conflicts and political upheaval.

Participating artists will present a range of responses—a short performance, written score, film, audio-recording, descriptive essay or something yet imagined.

FUTURE DANCES will be shared in mid-March 2025 (dates/times coming soon!), in-person at The Commons @ 401 Richmond St W in Toronto and afterwards on both the Dancemakers and FADO websites. STAY TUNED for details.

*This venue is fully wheelchair accessible and ASL will be offered upon request

Artists include (top left to bottom right): Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Nova Bhattacharya, Ronnie Clarke, Ravyn Wngz, Laura Taler, Freya Björg Olafson, Margaret Dragu and Lee Su-Feh.

Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a nonbinary Polish-born performance and media artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Drawing on personal experiences of labour and loss, their practice builds metaphors around the precarity of social structures. Combining queer femme tropes with construction materials, their most recent work explores the relationship between the labouring body and the built environment.

Nova Bhattacharya is an award-winning artist, cultural innovator, and unapologetic trailblazer based in Tkaronto. A Bengali-Canadian and Scarborough rocker with a rebellious edge, she draws on a kaleidoscope of influences to create vivid, genre-defying works that fuse technical mastery with raw, emotional resonance. Fearlessly reinterpreting traditions and reinventing rituals, Nova’s creations challenge expectations and celebrate community.  

Ronnie Clarke is a movement and sound artist living and working in Toronto, Ontario. Her work blends elements of choreography, dance, movement, collaboration, video and installation. With an interest in the poetics of digital gestures, spaces and interfaces, she often uses movement to investigate how technology plays a role in our interactions with others. 

Ravyn Wngz “The Black Widow of Burlesque” is an Afro-Indigenous, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent multidisciplinary art maker, curator and empowerment storyteller.  Her work is rooted in abolition and expressed through movement theater, political education, cultural research, DEI consultancy, and many forms of disability justice.

Romanian-born Canadian artist Laura Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art. Throughout her career Taler has explored the links between movement, voice, memory, and history by using cinematic and choreographic devices to articulate how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. Her work has been praised for its unique combination of emotional resonance, wit, and striking visuals. 

Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. In spring 2020 Olafson was one of the longlist ‘Sobey Art Award’ recipients and in July 2021 was selected for the Lumen Prize for Art & Technology longlist. Olafson holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität. From 2017 - 2021 Olafson was with the Department of Dance at York University as an Assistant Professor in Screendance. As of July 2021, Olafson is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media at the University of Manitoba School of Art. 

Margaret Dragu was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012, Éminence Grise (2012) for 7a*11d, and in 2000, the first artist in FADO's publication series Canadian Performance Art Legends. Dragu works in video, installation, web/analogue publication & performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, she has shown in Canada, USA & Europe.  

Lee Su-Feh (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, performance-maker and teacher of voice and movement. She splits her time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she was born and raised; and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where she makes her home. Over the past 35 years, she has created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. As Artistic Director of battery opera performance, (“fearlessly iconoclastic”, “brainy and bawdy”), she has worked both alone and in collaboration with others.

Cover Image: from Freya Björg Olafson’s work