Message from the Artistic Director
When I look at the 2026/27 DanceHouse Season, I think about systems.
Some systems are visible — like the global network of knitters that formed around Cirkus Cirkör’s monumental Knitting Peace, connecting communities through the shared act of making. Others are less tangible, like the subtle pressures toward conformity that pulse beneath Catherine Gaudet’s ODE. Whether social, cultural, civic, or ecological, systems shape how we gather, how we move, and how we understand ourselves in relation to others.
Artists must contend with the time in which they live. In dance, this engagement may be direct or oblique, intimate or expansive. Yet across different styles and geographies, performance reveals the shared tissue of human experience. The artists featured in this DanceHouse season embody a wide continuum of creative expression: moving from ritual collectivity to interpersonal entanglement, from cultural boundaries to democratic deliberation, and outward to planetary awareness — reflecting the collective life of a global community.
We are proud to launch our 19th season with Montréal’s Compagnie Catherine Gaudet. Following DanceHouse’s previous presentation of the company’s epic Les jolies choses, ODE examines the dynamics of group behaviour, exposing the tensions between unity and individuality, conformity and resistance.
In Swedish circus company Cirkus Cirkör’s Knitting Peace, trapeze and ladders give way to ropes and vast expanses of knitted material. This materiality becomes a metaphor for the ties that bind and support us, revealing both the fragility and resilience of interconnected communities.
In its North American premiere, Aditi Mangaldas’s exploration of female sexuality takes aim at the social strictures of shame that have suppressed and suffocated desire for centuries. Combining the classical vocabulary of Kathak with contemporary questions of agency and constraint, Forbidden casts off taboos and celebrates the liberating power of sexuality in its fullest expression.
DanceHouse is also proud to bring Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall back to Vancouver following its international acclaim. Choreographer Crystal Pite, playwright Jonathon Young, and their collaborators explore the mechanics of collective decision-making — how voices converge, conflict, and coalesce within shared civic space.
Finally, Wayne McGregor’s Deepstaria expands the conversation to an ecological scale. Taking its title from a species of deep-sea jellyfish, the work draws upon science, technology, and the natural world to illuminate the mysterious connections between humans and their environment. McGregor’s masterful choreography returns us to our oceanic origins, reconsidering humanity’s place within vast and often unseen systems that extend far beyond our physical selves.
Art is political — not in a polemical or prescriptive sense, but in something deeper. At its root, the word politics comes from the Greek polis: the life of the city, the shared space of people in relation to one another. It also speaks to the broader interconnections among people, culture, and society.
Taken together, these works reflect the realities of living in an intertwined world. They do not offer simple answers. Instead, they invite us to witness, to question, and to imagine how we assemble — as individuals and as communities within larger and infinitely complex ecosystems. In this human movement, we are connected in intangible, oblique, and wondrous ways.
Join the movement.
Jim Smith
Artistic Director
Photo: Jim Smith © Rebecca Ross
