Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s suicide note
1975
Choreographed by Anna Blewchamp
Performed by William Douglas, Carol Anderson, and Pat Fraser
ArtiSts
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
“Garba is more than a dance—it is a moving meditation. With every turn of the circle, we release, reconnect, and rediscover our place within a larger community.”
Fri Sept 4 2026
4pm | workshop
5pm | showcase & party
Small Arms Inspection Building
(1352 Lakeshore Rd E #1352 Mississauga)
RangaMandal is a participatory dance and visual art experience inspired by the Gujarati folk tradition of Garba. Blending community gathering, movement, and collective artmaking, the project transforms a simple circle dance into a living canvas.
Throughout the evening, participants dance on a large canvas with paint-covered feet, creating layers of colour, pattern, and texture through their movement. As the circular pathways of Garba unfold, individual traces merge into a vibrant mandala—a collective artwork shaped by rhythm, repetition, and shared intention.
Rooted in the spiritual and communal foundations of Garba, RangaMandal explores the circle as a symbol of connection, renewal, and belonging. The project reimagines ritual as contemporary participatory art, blurring the boundaries between performer and audience, dance and visual art, individual expression and collective creation.
The resulting artwork serves as both a record of the gathering and a reflection of the community that created it while capturing a fleeting moment of movement in a lasting visual form.
Curator: Purawai Vyas
Workshop Leader: Shivani Joshi
Garba Performance Artists: Anjali Tanna, Team Nritya and Omkara Dance
Live Music: Vrunda Upadhyay Garba Ensemble
Production Team: Rajvi Dedhia, Bistro Renwarin, Anisha Manyal, Parth Ganatra, Helee Mehta, Dhruv Naik, Jay Patel
Sound Technician: Gandhaar Amin
Lighting Designer: Emerson Kafarowski
Photographer: Abhishek R.Drone
Videographer: Aditya Rajendra
cUraTor & Artists
Purawai Vyas
Purawai Vyas is a Canadian dance artist based in Toronto, with a practice rooted in over two decades of Bharatanatyam training under Guru Lata Pada at Sampradaya Dance Academy.
Vrunda Upadhyay’s Garba Ensemble
An energetic Gujarati folk ensemble presenting authentic live Garba and Raas through powerful vocals, traditional rhythms, and vibrant musicianship.
Shivani Joshi
Shivani Joshi is an Indian Classical and Folk dancer, exploring form with pieces that incorporate fragmented narratives, prop work, and cultural ritual as practice.
Team Nritya
Team Nritya is Canada’s versatile Indian dance school and production team, proudly preserving culture through authentic performances.
Gandhaar Amin
Gandhaar Amin is a music composer and producer, known for his innovative reimagining of the Indian fusion music genre.
Rajvi Dedhia
Rajvi Dedhia is a Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, educator, and arts administrator from India, dedicated to cultural sharing and community engagement.
Bristo Renwarin
Toronto-trained dancer blending hip hop foundations with Bollywood, Afro, and Latin dance team performances across shows, weddings, and competitions.
Anisha Manyal
Anisha is a Bharatanatyam-trained choreographer working across South Asian and contemporary collaborative performance in Toronto.
Parth Ganatra
Real estate agent by profession, dancer by heart, always chasing the feeling that only music and movement can bring.
Helee Mehta
Helee Mehta has participated in various Garba competitions and dance performances, immersing herself in the joyful and energetic rhythms of this traditional folk dance.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
We prioritize wheelchair accessible spaces for all of our events. The Small Arms Inspection Building is wheelchair accessible.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance can include audio description upon request.
Co-presented with
Tales of those who move.
A dialogue between music and dance.
Connecting. Reconnecting.
A community call.
Sat Aug 29 2026
7pm
Underpass Park
(29 Lower River Street)
NKABOM, Choreographic Works that push the boundaries of movement, culture, and community.
A dynamic dialogue between tradition and innovation, individual expression and collective experience.
Connecting. Reconnecting. Building community through movement
NKABOM brings together artists from Toronto and Montreal to support and celebrate African street dance in Canada, fostering collective expression through the blending of diverse movement forms and perspectives.
The local artists involved in NKABOM will engage in a residency that promotes the exploration of movement, with each artist contributing their individual expression rooted in African street dance to a collective choreographic work. Drawing from their unique movement languages and personal experiences, the artists will collaboratively develop a shared creation that explores themes of re-connection while pushing the boundaries of their creative journeys and artistic practices.
Curator Kwasi Obeng-Adeji
Dancers Athena Lucie Assamba & Leah Danga
Dancer Rose-Mary Harbans
Drummer Amosun Adeifa
DJ TrayBaby
Local Dancer Martin Prempeh
Local Dancer Monique Pascall
Local Dancer Janice Ellis
Local Dancer Bairen Oluwashola
Sound Technician Lamar Ferguson
Lighting Designer Theo Belc
Technical Assistants Jason Ball, Husseine Esmail & Rowan Campbell
Inspiration for this includes:
cUraTor & Artists
Kwasi Obeng-Adjei
Kwasi Obeng-Adjei is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, emerging choreographer, and dance educator based in Brampton, Ontario.
Athena Lucie Assamba
Athena Lucie Assamba Montreal based interdisciplinary artist exploring dances of African source as living practices of ancestral memory, liberation, healing, and collective transformation.
Leah Danga
Leah Danga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal, specializing in contemporary and traditional African dances, with a background in hip-hop and popping.
Rose-Mary Harbans
Rose-Mary “Rosie” Harbans is a Dora-nominated performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Toronto. Rosie’s practice approaches movement as a vessel for liberation, healing, and storytelling.
Bairen Oluwashola
Nigerian-born Afro Fusion choreographer and educator inspiring global connection through movement, culture, and authentic African dance.
Janice Ellis
Janice Ellis is a first-generation artist of Jamaican and Ghanaian descent whose practice is rooted in African diasporic dance forms, including Azonto, Nigerian street styles, and traditional African dance.
Martin Prempeh
Born in Kumasi, Ghana and raised in Toronto, Canada, King Martin Luther Prempeh also known as PREMPZ.
Monique Pascall
Monique Pascall is a Toronto-born performer, choreographer, and educator
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
We prioritize wheelchair accessible spaces for all of our events. This venue is outdoors and is wheelchair accessible.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance can include audio description upon request.
Night Shift is a durational performance inspired by Le Ballet de la Nuit, a 13-hour court ballet that was most notable for the involvement of the young Louis XIV.
Night Shift is a durational performance inspired by Le Ballet de la Nuit, a 13-hour court ballet that was most notable for the involvement of the young Louis XIV, who performed many roles, including the title of the Sun King.
Danced throughout the night, the ballet acted as a performance with night (darkness) cast as a metaphoric plague on society. The dance is performed as an offering to call upon daylight, when the Sun King exiles the darkness, and the dawn (light) signifies a new beginning through the start of a new day.
Brendan Fernandes has re-contextualized the ballet into a contemporary dance performance in which dancers endure from dusk until dawn, dancing and making gold confetti in anticipation of the new tomorrow. At dawn in celebration of the new day, the accumulated piles of gold confetti will be thrown into the air and the piece ends.
Night Shift questions notions of labour and time within the context of night changing into day as the dancer’s body endures and asserts itself while in the process of performing.
Choreography by Brendan Fernandez
In collaboration with Michael Trent
Performed by Michael Trent, Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Joanie Audet, Austin Fagan, Sky Fairchild Waller, Kate Holden, Ame Henderson, Ellen Furey, Benjamin Kamino, Cyril Limousin, Simon Portigal, Jolyane Langlois, Simon Renaud, Colleen Snell, Andrea Spaziani, Cara Spooner, Christopher Willes and Jacob Zimmer
Original Score by Thomas Ian Campbell
Costume design by Vanessa Fischer
Artists
Michael Trent
Michael Trent was the Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer of Toronto’s Dancemakers from 2006 – 2014.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Rob Abubo
Robert Abubo was a member of Dancemakers since September 2008.
Benjamin Kamino
Benjamin Kamino was a company dancer under the direction of Serge Bennethan and Michael Trent. In 2014, he transitioned into the role of Co-Curator alongside Emi Forster.
Ellen Furey
Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, facilitator, spiritual psychic and death doula.
Andrea Spaziani
Canadian contemporary choreographer and performer, holds an MFA from the Transart Institute/ Plymouth University.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
“The land is to the people what blood is to the body” – Tránsito Amaguaña (1909-2009)
Sat May 30 2026 | 7pm | High Park
Sun May 31 2026 | 3pm | High Park + post show discussion
Soil Study (2024) is an ongoing series by artist sarah koekkoek of discursive experiments, processes, interventions and conversations between the human body and soil/soil memory.
sarah has been deeply engaged in these explorations over the past 3 years, working through an array of artistic mediums including sculpture, photography, screen printing, movement, choreography, digital GIFs and ASCII art. Much like our bodies, soil hosts ecological life, political struggles and cultural memory through slow accumulation, care and violence. This presentation of a process based performance is situated on the ancestral lands of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat. The audience is invited to witness a weaving together of personal memories etched into mine and the performers bodies together with 9,000 years of collective, historical and biological narratives of soil bodies. These memories, embedded in both human and soil archives, collide, converge, resist, mourn, celebrate and repair in unison.
Engaging with soil in this way means confronting questions of repair, responsibility, and futurity. Together we resist the damage of industrial, agricultural and colonial extraction. Manifesting alternative time scales, where like the soil, we accumulate memory through repetition, sedimentation and decay.
Curated by Holly Chang
Choreographed by sarah koekkoek
Performed by sarah koekkeok & Eve Tagny
Sound design by Eva Lev Myers & Julian Myers
Outside eye support by Amanda Acorn & Aisha Sasha John
Indigenous Consultation by Alex Jacobs-Blum
Essay by Heather Canlas-Rigg
Inspiration for this includes:
sarah’s practice and the performance Soil Study is inspired by nature, environmental systems, queer and feminist theorists like Donna Haraway, Sylvia Fredrici, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa as well as deep and non linear timescales
cUraTor & Artists
Holly Chang
Holly Chang is a Toronto based artist, curator, and researcher. Her practice is focused on topics of hybridity, craft, and ecology.
sarah koekkoek
sarah koekkoek is an ecology focused multidisciplinary artist working with movement, dance, flora and biomaterials from Tkarón:to (Toronto).
Eve Tagny
Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist.
Eva Lev Myers
Eva Lev Myers is a multidisciplinary artist from Tkarón:to/Toronto working across an array of intermodal expressive art forms.
Julian Myers
Julian Myers is a sound designer and composer currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Aisha Sasha John
Aisha Sasha John is a performer, choreographer and poet.
Alex Jacobs-Blum
Alex Jacobs-Blum (she/her) is a Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ (Cayuga) and German visual artist and independent curator living in Hamilton, ON.
Heather Canlas-Rigg
Heather Canlas-Rigg is a curator, writer and educator based in Toronto.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
We will be moving around the park in slightly uneven terrain.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
Loss exposes us and demands we find a way back to each other
Dancemakers’ Artistic Director Michael Trent re-imagines a dance from the Company’s 100-plus repertoire, a body of work amassed over its 38-year history and created by noted Canadian and international artists.
Wanting something other than a traditional remount, Trent creates a new dance piece in response to choreographer Mitchell Rose’s 1974 Following Station Identification, a ‘satirical dance on middle-American values’ set to music by Luciano Berio and Lukas Foss.
Choreography by Michael Trent
Created with and originally performed by
Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Kate Holden, Benjamin Kamino and Simon Renaud
Composer: Christopher Willes
Musician: Thom Gill
Lighting Designer: Kimberly Purtell
Costume Designer: Vanessa Fischer
Artists
Michael Trent
Michael Trent was the Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer of Toronto’s Dancemakers from 2006 – 2014.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Rob Abubo
Robert Abubo was a member of Dancemakers since September 2008.
Benjamin Kamino
Benjamin Kamino was a company dancer under the direction of Serge Bennethan and Michael Trent. In 2014, he transitioned into the role of Co-Curator alongside Emi Forster.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
Loss exposes us and demands we find a way back to each other
Rarely finding creative motivation in the events from his personal life, in this work Michael Trent takes the time to look at the bodily affects of love and loss.
It is often said of love and of loss that there are stages, which change and grow, suffer setbacks and make great leaps forward. These stages are what we understand only after; in the middle – in the experience – there is meeting and parting, finding stability or barely balancing on our own or with loved ones.
Loss exposes us and demands we find a way back to each other and to ourselves by moving in ways that avoid the paralysis of sadness and missing. Because in missing so much it makes us reach, throw our bodies just to see if we can still catch ourselves. It makes us stop and start again to be sure we are not lost in the thousand-yard stare that sees everything and nothing.
Visible and exposed from all sides, loveloss asks the performers to imagine and sense, to improvise their way through states of activities and states of being as they move into love and into loss, out of love and out of loss.
Choreography by Michael Trent
Created with and performed by Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Ellen Furey, Simon Portigal, Simon Renaud
Composer Christopher Willes
Dramaturge Jacob Zimmer
Lighting Designer Kimberly Purtell
Costume Designer Vanessa Fischer
Artists
Michael Trent
Michael Trent was the Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer of Toronto’s Dancemakers from 2006 – 2014.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Ellen Furey
Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, facilitator, spiritual psychic and death doula.
Rob Abubo
Robert Abubo was a member of Dancemakers since September 2008.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
Using the Rite of Spring as a jumping off point
In Hi-Fi, the Dancemakers company dancers and their collaborators – Nick Andison, Xenia Benivolski, Marianna Rosato, Christopher Willes and Jacob Zimmer – come together in a different way.
In response to the extremely successful presentation of Lo-Fi, An Evening of Works-In-Progress in 2012, Dancemakers Artistic Director Michael Trent has relinquished his fall season and handed it over, along with all the authority, to the resident company dancers.
The company dancers and their collaborators are using the Rite of Spring as a jumping off point for Hi-Fi. The current Wikipedia entry for the Rite of Spring reads: “[in] various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death.”
A possible future Wikipedia entry for Dancemakers’ Hi-Fi might read: “[in] various contemporary rituals celebrating the advent of something new, nine young people consented to sacrifice themselves into a history of sorts.”
With the presumption of roles removed, the consensual mutiny can begin! In, with and through Hi-Fi, the artists can question authority, criticize the mandate of the company that engages them, and push their own physical boundaries in a safe and supportive environment.
Throughout the unorthodox creation period, the artists surrender to the work: dancer becomes dramaturge, costume designer becomes dancer and dancer becomes musician in order to explore the conundrum of contemporary living.
Made and Performed by:
Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Nick Andison, Xenia Benivolski, Ellen Furey, Benjamin Kamino, Simon Portigal, Christopher Willes and Jacob Zimmer
Lighting Design: Nick Andison
Stage Manager: Marianna Rosato
Artists
Michael Trent
Michael Trent was the Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer of Toronto’s Dancemakers from 2006 – 2014.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Benjamin Kamino
Benjamin Kamino was a company dancer under the direction of Serge Bennethan and Michael Trent. In 2014, he transitioned into the role of Co-Curator alongside Emi Forster.
Ellen Furey
Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, facilitator, spiritual psychic and death doula.
Rob Abubo
Robert Abubo was a member of Dancemakers since September 2008.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
Forty years of Dancemakers
Celebrating Dancemakers 40th anniversary, this new work mines all the ways we encounter ourselves and others in our pursuit of being human.
Working through the production of continuous and non-repeating image-making in groups of 1 to 10, the artists create a series of successive encounters between bodies, the environment and sound.
Through a process of emergence and dissolution, they reveal a space for the viewers’ imagination to take flight.
Choreography and set design by Michael Trent
Created with and performed by
Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Ellen Furey, Lee Gelbloom, Andrew Hartley, Benjamin Kamino, Jolyane Langlois, Anna Mayberry, Simon Portigal and Riley Sims
Sound Score by Christopher Willes
Dramaturgy by Jacob Zimmer
Lighting by Kimberly Purtell
Costumes by Vanessa Fischer
Artists
Michael Trent
Michael Trent was the Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer of Toronto’s Dancemakers from 2006 – 2014.
Amanda Acorn
Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Benjamin Kamino
Benjamin Kamino was a company dancer under the direction of Serge Bennethan and Michael Trent. In 2014, he transitioned into the role of Co-Curator alongside Emi Forster.
Ellen Furey
Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, facilitator, spiritual psychic and death doula.
Rob Abubo
Robert Abubo was a member of Dancemakers since September 2008.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.
CHRONIC NEED is a work by Alicia Grant in collaboration with Andrea Spaziani.
My interest is how to work at sculpting an endlessly recurrent, infinitely present and troublesome need.
By working with presence and absence, Andrea and I are working at shifting our modes of perception. How can we receive the information of the wigs, the public, discomfort and pleasure? How do we stay with the unnameable?
The wigs, for me, are our field of ghosts. Frightening and powerful, empty yet full.
Throughout the process, I encouraged long physical tangents to arrive at a distilled, fierce and confusing situation where the dance could occur.
It’s a hyperfeminine garbage bag:
it’s about
needs
it’s about
desires
it’s about
necessity
it’s about
time
it’s about
what doesn’t leave you
it’s about
what’s always with you
it’s about
something that’s always there
Curated by Ben Kamino & Emi Foster
ArtisTs
Benjamin Kamino
Benjamin Kamino was a company dancer under the direction of Serge Bennethan and Michael Trent. In 2014, he transitioned into the role of Co-Curator alongside Emi Forster.
Emi Forster
From 2014-2015 Emi Forster was Co-Curator at Dancemakers alongside Benjamin Kamino, successfully implementing the inaugural year of the Incubation Production House Model, designed by Michael Trent.
Alicia Grant
Alicia Grant is a dance, performance, video and installation artist.
Andrea Spaziani
Canadian contemporary choreographer and performer, holds an MFA from the Transart Institute/ Plymouth University.
acCessibilIty
Is the venue wheelchair accessible?
Yes, the venue is wheelchair accessible including ramps into the building, elevators and wheelchair accessible washrooms.
Will the event be ASL Interpreted?
All live events will offer ASL interpretation (upon request). Please contact us to request ASL Interpretation.
Will the event be described for Blind and low vision audiences?
This performance does not include audio description.