Message from the Artistic Director
It can sometimes feel like the world is coming apart at the seams. Fracture, fragmentation, and division are rampant, not only in the political and social arenas but increasingly in our own hearts and minds. One moment, you’re fomenting for revolution, the next you simply want to find a hidey hole and retreat from everything.
But I noticed something when I looked at the 2025/26 DanceHouse Season.
In all of these very different productions, the work of making things that are meaningful, powerful and beautiful shines out. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Australia, Hungary, Taiwan, or Canada; the necessity of art brings us together in a kind of creative transcendence.
Throughout history, when all the political struggles and daily existence have fallen away, art and culture have endured. There’s a reason that Shakespeare’s epic drama Hamlet continues to rivet our attention hundreds of years after its writing. It still speaks to the issues that have long beset human beings and our ability to transform the raw material of pain, struggle, and suffering into something numinous.
We are very excited to launch the upcoming season with Daniel Léveillé’s masterwork Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts). Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Choreography in 2004, this extraordinary piece returns with a critical lesson about the struggle for intimacy and contact. Using the naked body, Léveillé offers a profound meditation on the human condition.
Employing a head piece called “Ling Zi” that incorporates pheasant tail feathers worn in traditional Chinese opera to represent warrior’s power and skill, Taiwan’s Hung Dance summons the wildest of spirits in Birdy. With subversive wit and style, this fascinating work explicates Taiwan’s past, present and future with grace and power.
Under the direction of artistic director and choreographer Bence Vági, Hungary’s cirque dance company Recirquel invests traditional circus acts with a spiritual intelligence and emotional profundity, transfiguring feats of strength and agility into iconographic images in Paradisum.
Ex Machina + Côté Danse reinvent Shakespeare’s archetypal drama into something new and immediate in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The nine members of Côté Danse engage with existential questions of being and nothingness through the iconic characters of Shakespeare’s most famous play. Through the universal language of dance, co-creators Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté create a play without words that still speaks to the ages.
We’re closing out the season with a bang with Manifesto from Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company. Drawing inspiration from the primeval connection between drumming and dancing, Manifesto fuses together a wide variety of different dance styles. The work pairs nine drummers and nine dancers into a battalion of attack and rhythm, creating a choreographic fission.
No other art form is quite as steeped in collective effort as dance. It’s not just the choreographer or the performers on stage but the many people working behind the scenes to make shows happen, lighting designers, stage managers, and costume designers. From the ushers who hand out programs to the volunteers who give freely of their time, it all comes together in the creative crucible that is live performance. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a subscriber, do it now! As a DanceHouse subscriber, you won’t miss a single performance.
A quote attributed to Winston Churchill about cutting funding to the arts to support the efforts of the Second World War resulted in the famous statement: “Then what would we be fighting for?”
In all its polarizing contradiction, I believe that the world is still worth fighting for. We’re in this together, after all.
– Jim Smith, Artistic Director
