DanceHouse Announces 2025/26 Season

DanceHouse Announces Potent, Poignant & Provocative 2025/26 Season

Striking season includes a bold retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and
otherworldly explorations of freedom, joy, passion, and the cosmos

DanceHouse announces its 2025/26 season of captivating, genre-defying performances from Canada and around the world – on Vancouver stages from October 25 through April 2026. Five companies and choreographers will present works that critically examine the many facets of our human experience, from our darkest instincts of corruption and betrayal, to our universal desire for freedom and a collective call for radical joy. DanceHouse’s 18th season includes a North American premiere, three Vancouver premieres, and a DanceHouse company debut.

“We could not be more thrilled with our 18th season line-up, which offers a breathtaking representation of the diverse breadth and depth present in international contemporary dance today,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “With performance styles drawn from a vast array of cultural and contemporary influences – from martial arts and circus to Shakespeare and ritualistic drumming – audiences will be transported on a transformative journey around the globe.”

The 2025/26 DanceHouse Season includes:

Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts) – Daniel Léveillé (DLD) (Montréal)

October 24 & 25, 2025 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse 

The body, in all its plaintive and humble beauty, forms the fundament of Daniel Léveillé’s masterwork Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts). Winner of the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal (2017), Léveillé’s artistic integrity, vision, and creative impact have shaped Canadian dance. His iconic work returns with a critical lesson: “We must love one another or die,” as the poet W.H. Auden wrote. 

Set against a score of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, pop music, and birdsong, Léveillé uses the mechanics of arms, legs, torsos and skulls to plumb the very nature of the human condition. As the dancers move through a series of entanglements, the shock of nudity disappears, helped along by a lick of humour that runs underneath the solos, duets, and ensemble work. The shared commonality of the physical is reborn in all its delicacy and resolve.

Birdy – Hung Dance (Taiwan)

Community Partner: Asian-Canadian Special Events Association

November 28 & 29, 2025 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse 

Vancouver Premiere

Employing a head piece called “Ling Zi” that incorporates pheasant tail feathers worn in traditional Chinese opera to represent a warrior’s power and skill, Birdy offers up a magpie creation, concretizing bright bursts of freedom against the weighted cage of history.  

Founded in 2017 by choreographer Lai Hung-Chung, Hung Dance’s choreographic vocabulary is drawn from martial arts, Peking opera, and traditional cultural symbols. Through the prism of performance, Taiwan’s complex history and political status metamorphize into a thrilling new dance language. 

The calligraphic eloquence of four-feet long feathers moves from gentleness to violence, transforming into spears, whips, and a blade drawn sharply across the throat. As the dancers flock together in rippling patterns of conformity and divergence, rituals of behaviour gleaned from the non-human world, find their choreographic counterparts. Group think meets the defiance of individual identity, revealing a universal cry for freedom.

Paradisum – Recirquel (Hungary)
Co-presented with The Cultch
January 21-24, 2026 at 8pm and January 24, 2026 at 2pm | Vancouver Playhouse

North American Premiere

Hungary’s cirque dance company Recirquel, under the direction of the company’s artistic director and choreographer Bence Vági, brings intellectual rigour to traditional circus acts, braiding together vertiginous risk with a profound emotional core. Alive with a spiritual intelligence, Paradisum transfigures feats of strength and agility into iconographic images. 

With its reference to a post-apocalyptic world, Paradisum summons archetypal figures, each engaged with the overwhelming effort of existence. Elevating aerial and groundwork, elements of stagecraft – a rippling black drape, a ladder, rings, a hoop – create otherworldly vistas. Underpinning the larger cosmological ideas with concrete manifestations, the work is both deeply grounded in the earth and yet defiant of gravity.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark – Ex Machina & Côté Danse (Quebec City & Toronto)

Community Partner: Bard on the Beach
March 19-21, 2026 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse

BC Premiere

Eschewing words, Ex Machina + Côté Danse’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark reinvents Shakespeare’s archetypal drama into something raw and immediate. Canonical soliloquies that parse the darkest of human instincts and actions: corruption, suicide, betrayal and murder find a riveting new form. 

Expanding upon their previous collaboration Frame by Frame (inspired by the work of visionary animator Norman McLaren), co-creators Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté bring their respective genius to Shakespeare’s most famous work. Côté embodies the central character, wrestling with existential questions of being and nothingness, while Lepage, a master of multiple theatrical disciplines, infuses the Bard’s epic tale of intergenerational trauma with contemporary relevance.

Manifesto – Stephanie Lake Company (Australia)

Co-presented with Vancouver New Music
April 16-18, 2026 at 8pm | Vancouver Playhouse

BC Premiere

Channeling ancient rituals of catharsis, Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company fuses different dance styles to create choreographic fission. Manifesto takes inspiration from the primeval connection between drumming and dancing, combining attack and rhythm, chaos and order to create obliterating dynamism.  

In this ‘tattoo to optimism’ nine musicians and nine dancers fuse their respective instruments to offer up a collective call for radical joy. Against the backdrop of a towering velvet curtain, Manifesto sets loose a cacophonic wall of sound, grounded in effort and soaring on human energy. Pairing performers into units, the work ratchets up in intensity, adding complex rhythms with choreographic phrases, blurring the lines between cohesion and bedlam into a capering brand of wild rebellion.

Subscriptions for past subscribers are on sale April 1 and for new subscribers on April 22. Choose Your Own Four packages are on sale May 13, and single tickets are on sale May 27. For tickets and further information, visit: dancehouse.ca                                            

About DanceHouse (dancehouse.ca)

DanceHouse connects Vancouver audiences and the local arts community to the international world of dance by presenting exceptional companies that are recognized for their excellence, innovation, and international reputation. Since 2008, DanceHouse has presented vibrant and inspiring companies from Canada and around the world. In addition to the performances on stage, DanceHouse offers a suite of engagement opportunities and a chance for the general public and local artistic community to engage with the presented artists and their work.

Media image provided by Laura Murray, Murray Paterson Marketing Group. Photo Credit: Roy VanDerVegt