soliDarity sTatementS
Dancemakers aims to demonstrate leadership in the field of dance by engaging in critical conversations around what “learning” and “un-learning” looks like to reflect a more decolonial reality for equity-seeking artists.
PACBI Endorsement – 2025
In 2025, Dancemakers joined other arts organizations in endorsing the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
Decolonial Resource List
The staff and Board of Directors at Dancemakers and Toronto Dance Community Love-In have come together through our shared values to articulate our heartfelt devastation at the loss of Palestinian life since the Israeli military’s violent campaign of collective punishment was enacted in October 2023.
Pro-Palestine Statement – 2024
The staff and Board of Directors at Dancemakers and Toronto Dance Community Love-In have come together through our shared values to articulate our heartfelt devastation at the loss of Palestinian life since the Israeli military’s violent campaign of collective punishment was enacted in October 2023.
We don’t always get it right, but we will continue to try to lean in the direction of justice, equity and liberation for all peoples.
As we join the collective call to end the war on Gaza by joining hundreds of Canadian arts organizations in endorsing the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), we want to express with certainty and clarity that Jewish and Israeli individuals are safe and welcome at Dancemakers events as artists, audience members and are a valued part of our community.
We understand that the tensions of the ongoing conflict abroad have resulted in a rise in violence and crimes against Muslim, Jewish and Arab people everywhere, not least of all in Toronto. We do not stand for hate or discrimination of any kind.
Dancemakers amplifies PACBI’s rejection to boycott individuals based on their opinion or identity (such as citizenship, race, gender, or religion). Instead, Dancemakers endorses PACBI’s advocacy for the boycott of “academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law.”
As we continue to work with Jewish and Palestinian artists and curators to platform their ideas and dances, we do so in continuation of a legacy of 50 years of politically-minded, socially-conscious art.
The timeline below is only small selection of how Dancemakers has been connecting dance and moving bodies with larger political and social movements world-wide:
1974:
Dancemakers was established as a Dance collective made up of York University Dance program graduates. A founding company member describes the original intention of the group to be “this extremely egalitarian, democratic, socialist kind of […] collective of people, where everybody contributed to everything. So you made decisions together, you did all the work together.”
Read more about this in Mairéad Filgate’s 10 interviews.
1976:
Dancemakers’ early company goes on a tour of prisons across Southwestern Ontario, democratizing dance for the most marginalized in our society.
Watch Tamara Jones’ experimental film titled Freedom of Movement.
1996:
Serge Bennathan premieres “Chronicles of a Simple Life” which goes on to become one of the company’s most well-documented works. The work was based on Bennathan’s loss of a close friend to AIDS. In the stigmatized context of AIDS related homophobia in th 1980s and 1990s, Artist-Researcher Raymundo Moreno notes: “Bennathan’s exploration of queerness and the experience of having a beloved person with HIV/AIDS speaks to the heart of what art should accomplish: it should challenge societal norms, provoke thought, and create dialogue around critical issues.”
Read Raymundo’s full reflection here.
2017:
Amelia Ehrhardt curates Lee Su-Feh’s “The Talking Thinking Dancing Body”. The project “carries forward the values laid out by its founding facilitators: an intersectional feminist lens, and a commitment to anti-racist, anti-ableist, decolonial approaches and perspectives.”
Read more about this project here.
2022:
After being on the brink of closure, Dancemakers resurfaces with a new board and different structure. A report is done in consultation with Toronto’s dance community in which a chorus of voices expresses: “beyond equity, diversity and inclusion, we value a Dancemakers that is decolonizing, abolitionist, embodied, artistic, joyful, supportive, decentralizing and socially, ecologically and historically conscious.”
Read the full report here.
2024:
Politically-motivated artists featured in the Dancemakers 2023/2024 season come forward with a direct demand for the organization to release a statement about the war on Gaza. After months of conversation with our board of directors, Dancemakers collaborates with the Toronto Dance Community Love-In to create the Decolonial Solidarity Partnership, issuing a statement of solidarity with indigenous people in Palestine and all over Turtle Island.
Read the full statement here.
2025:
Dancemakers joins a third wave of arts organizations to publicly endorse PACBI.
Read more about PACBI here.
