Featuring Devon Healey and Esie Mensah, Sekou McMiller and TMU, Jingle Dress Champion Dancers and Azzam Mohamed.
October 25 @ 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM, 7:00 PM October 26 @ 2:00 PM, 3:00 PM, 4:00 PM OCAD University
Running Time: 60 minutes
Co-presented with
Azzam Mohamed
GLAD
Sydney-based dancer Azzam Mohamed will perform GLAD. Azzam Mohamed, also known as Shazam, is a dancer, MC, educator, and interdisciplinary choreographer and performer from Sudan, currently based on Gadigal Land. His dance practice merges street, club, hip hop and traditional African dance from his homeland and neighbouring African countries.
Co-presented with Luminato Festival
Creator, Performer, Music and Design: Azzam Mohamed
Running Time: 15 minutes
In partnership with PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, ReadyMade Works Inc, PYT Fairfield
Azzam Mohamed is a dancer, performer, and educator. He has been dancing for more than 13 years, and has trained in an array of different dance styles, from Afro-House and Kuduro to HipHop, Popping and House. In 2019 he was champion of Destructive Steps, Australia’s premiere street dance competition. As an educator, he has taught at Sydney’s major universities, including UTS, UNSW, and USYD. He performed with his street dance crew Riddim Nation and Paris-based crew Lady Rocks in Nick Power’s contemporary and street dance crossover work, Two Crews, produced by Intimate Spectacle, and commissioned by Sydney and Adelaide Festivals in 2020.
He was a key collaborator in Jack Prest’s The Risk of Hyperbole, (2021) his first full-length work as solo performer and choreographer, and continues to collaborate with Jack, including in Intimate Spectacle’s co-production with Art Gallery of NSW & Sydney Festival, MONUMENTAL (working title), in2022 and returning in 2023 for Sydney Festival. He curated and directed Sculptured Riddims for Sydney Festival 2024, three club nights of street dancers responding to Michael Shaw’s inflatable sculpture Hi-Vis in the Thirsty Mile festival club space, celebrating diverse communities, cultures, and music genres with various dance styles—from street to club to Afro dance. Azzam is also creating a full length work Katma, produced by PYT Fairfield, currently in development and to premiere in 2025. He is a member of the Board of Critical Path.
Jingle Dress Champion Dancers
On September 27th, Fall for Dance North presented Tkaranto Open III, a powwow-style competition featuring Old Style and Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Jingle Dress (Co-presented with Union & TO Live). Champion dancers Yanabah Whitehorse and Marley Fairfield will return to the festival to showcase their extraordinary artistry with the accompaniment of live drumming by Tkaronto Open Associate Producer and Master of Ceremony, Thunder Jack.
Jingle Dress Dancers: Marley Fairfield, Yanabah Whitehorse Drummer: Thunder Jack
Running Time: 6 minutes
Yanabah Whitehorse is a Contemporary Jingle Dress dancer from Standing Buffalo Saskatchewan. Enrolled in the Pipestone Dakota first nation reservation
Marley Fairfield is Mohawk, Turtle Clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River, now living in Aamjiwnaang First Nation. She serves as a Policy Analyst with the Department of Justice, where she focuses on addressing the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. A graduate of Nipissing University with a degree in Criminology, Marley brings both lived experience and academic insight to her work advancing justice and reconciliation for her people.
Devon Healey and Esie Mensah
Dancing With Blindness
FFDN Scholar-in-Residence and Artist-in-Residence dive into the relationship between blindness and dance. Following months of collaboration and research, Esie Mensah Creations will present a dance with Devon Healey’s Immersive Descriptive Audio which weaves together Mensah’s intentions and physicality with Healey’s experience of the movement through the perceptions of blindness. Immersive Descriptive Audio pulls us immediately into the dancing body, inviting both blind and sighted audiences to understand dance in a new way.
FFDN's presentation of Dancing With Blindness is generously supported by Davee Gunn and Virginia Burt.
Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness specifically and disability more broadly can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing blindness: Disability studies as critical creative narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Devon’s recent work engages disability studies and theatre and performance studies to explore how blind perception reveals new ways of creating, accessing, and experiencing theatre and dance. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars in co-production with Outside the March, the National Ballet of Canada and Peripheral Theatre premiered in 2025. This work is a sensory reclamation of blindness and marks the creation and development of Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA) – an accessible stagecraft practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. Devon is the Scholar in Residence at Toronto’s Fall for Dance North. In collaboration with choreographer Robert Binet, her work on blind perception has been featured by the Royal Ballet (UK), the Queensland Ballet (Australia), Vienna State Opera (Austria), and the National Ballet of Canada. Her publications include “When I leave…Exploring the Being and Appearance of Blindness” in Disability Studies Quarterly; “Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness” in Performance Research; “The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars’ in PUBLIC: Art, culture, ideas; “Sighted blindness consultants and the ever-lasting station of blindness” in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions; as well as a paper co-written with Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko titled, “Understanding blindness simulation and the culture of sight,” the international Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
Esie Mensah is FFDN Artist-in-Residence 2025. An award-winning choreographer, director, dancer, movement director, educator, and TEDx speaker, she is a powerful voice that is shaping the future of performance across dance, theatre, opera, and film/TV. A Dora-nominated artist, Esie has worked with global superstars like Rihanna, Nelly Furtado, Kenny Ortega, Canada’s Got Talent, AGO, and the Toronto Raptors. Her work has toured internationally to the U.S., U.K., Ghana, Nigeria, France, and more. She has created works for Soulpepper, Obsidian Theatre, and Shaw Festival, in addition to directing Serving Elizabeth at the Theatre Aquarius. This season, she makes her Stratford Festival debut with Ransacking Troy directed by Jackie Maxwell in August 2025 and is the choreographer for the Scott Joplin opera, Treemonisha: A Musical Reimagining, which premiered at the Harris Theatre in Chicago in May 2025. Esie is the Afrodiasporic Movement Program Lead & Afrofusion teacher with NBS.
Sekou McMiller and TMU
¡SÍ, BUENO!
A trilogy of bliss. Celebrating the many ways joy shows up in our lives. “Viva tu vida!” Jubilant, effortless and grounded.
FFDN's presentation of Sekou McMiller and TMU is generously supported by Tricon Residential.
Choreographer: Sekou McMiller Music: Chucho Valdes and Paquito D’Rivera, Dizzy Gillespie, and Brenda Navarrete Dancers from Performance Dance at the Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University (all solos are improv’d): Madison Costa, Severyn Dahlke, Denise Igama, Ainsley Inkpen, Marisa Khoo, Olivia Morris, Bennett Richardson, Liyah Simbulan, Thandi Strybos Rehearsal Director: Vicki St Denys Lighting Designer: Simon Rossiter Costume Design: Des’ree Gray TMU Stage Manager: Alexandra Alonzo
Running Time: 10 minutes
Sekou McMiller is a world renowned choreographer and director at the forefront of a new movement in the Afro-Latin dance and music world. His explosive energy has earned Sekou broad recognition world-wide, such as in the Warner Bros theatrical feature "In the Heights" (2021) and in the documentary, "Uprooted: the Journey of Jazz Dance.”
Sekou has performed and choreographed for top latin artists Gilberto Santa Rosa, Willie Colon, Cheo Feliciano, Johnny Pacheco, Tito Rojas, Tito Nieves, PitBull, and the pop icon Madonna. A recipient of fellowships with The Alvin Ailey Foundation’s New Directions Choreography Lab and Jacob’s Pillow Lab, Sekou’s choreographic works have been featured throughout North America and abroad in over 30 countries.
Currently, Sekou is a Professor of dance at NYU: Tisch School of the Arts, The Ailey School and Marymount Manhattan College.
Fall for Dance North Festival Production Credits
Director of Design: Simon Rossiter Director of Production: Barney Bayliss Production Manager: Brianne Gwartz Associate Lighting Designer: Noah Feaver Stage Manager: Kathy Le Assistant Stage Manager: Liliane Stilwell* Assistant Lighting Designers: Sruthi Suresan, Mathilda Kane
*The participation of these Artists is arranged by permission of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association under the provisions of the Dance Opera Theatre Policy (DOT).
FFDN ticket holders can round out their experience with free AGO admission to the Toronto installation ofKate Hilliard’s Story Creatures!
Your Up Next ticket gives you free entry to the exhibit which runs October 25 - 26, 2025.
Fall for Dance North Team
Leadership
Robert Binet - Artistic Director & Co-CEO
Lily Sutherland - Festival Director & Co-CEO
Aviva Fleising - General Manager
Melissa Forstner - Director of Advancement and Communications
Milana Glumicic - Director of Marketing
Melina Osorio - Finance Officer
Simon Rossiter - Director of Design
Barney Bayliss - Director of Production
Felicia Myronyk - Manager of Advancement
Markéta Tokova - Senior Producer
Julia Mak - Festival and Volunteer Coordinator
Seasonal Staff
Zita Nyarady - Company Manager
Angela Xu - Company Manager
Charlotte Cain - Content Creator
Lucy Rupert - Education and Engagement Coordinator
Cass Cabral Pucci - Community Arts Coordinator
Noah Feaver - Associate Lighting Designer
Jon Reid - Marketing Coordinator
Maria Al Sa'di - Patrons Services and Administrative Coordinator
Year-Round Collaborators
Web Development & Graphic Design Team -Mouth Media
Publicity & Communications -Murray Patterson Marketing Group
Financial Services -Robert Gore and Associates
To read more about our team and their bios, please visit theOur Team page on the FFDN website.
FFDN is Toronto’s premier professional international dance festival that exists to break boundaries and remove barriers.
With pluralism and affordability at its core, FFDN celebrates, nurtures and amplifies established and emerging Canadian dance artists, creates global connections, and inspires future audiences to sustain the artform.
