Performance

UP NEXT: Signature Programme 4

Esie Mensah, Devon Healey, Sekou McMiller and TMU, Jingle Dress Champions, Azzam Mohamed

  • October 25 - 26, 2025
  • Generously supported by Davee Gunn and Virginia Burt

You’ve seen the first three Signature Programmes, now discover what’s Up Next! On the closing weekend of the festival, FFDN is celebrating by looking forward. Let your curiosity lead you through this timed entry performance experience. Discover radical ways of seeing dance on the forefront. Catch new commissions, a Toronto premiere, and award winning dancers! Bring your friends, take photos, grab a drink, and discover what’s Up Next!

As we celebrate the 2025 festival, the visual arts and dance worlds collide in Grange Park! 

For the first time ever, FFDN is at OCAD U’s The Great Hall with an hour long, timed entry performance experience, Up Next.  The grand finale to the festival is all about looking forward: Discover Toronto’s next great contemporary dancers, stars of Indigenous Old Style and Contemporary Jingle Dance, a Sydney street artist co-presented with Luminato Festival, and Dancing with Blindness - a radical new way of perceiving dance.

As a bonus, FFDN ticket holders can round out their experience with free AGO admission to the Toronto installation of Kate Hilliard’s Story Creatures! Any FFDN 2025 ticket gives you free entry to the exhibit. 

Whether it's part of your Saturday evening or an October afternoon with the family, Up Next plus a free trip to the AGO will have you falling for dance. 

How it works: 

The performance is 45 mins long, and will repeat three times on each day.

Performance times:
Saturday Oct 25 at 5PM, 6PM, 7PM
*Sunday Oct 26 at 2PM, 3PM, 4PM


Tickets for Up Next are on a pay-what-you-wish sliding scale. 

$15, $25, $35, $50

BUY tickets

 Running Time 45 minutes

*Please note - all performances on Sunday Oct 26 will offer Audio Description


Featuring performances by...
Dancing With Blindness Project

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 work 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.

Generously supported by Davee Gunn and Virginia Burt.

Sekou McMiller and TMU

New York-based choreographer Sekou McMiller creates a new Afro Latin Jazz ensemble work for students in Performance Dance at The Creative School of Toronto Metropolitan University, the most intensive and comprehensive program of its kind in Canada.

Generously supported by Tricon Residential.

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.

Azzam Mohamed

Sydney-based street and club dance choreographer and performer 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