Unfinish / Unfurl

a mini-festival focused on creative practice and choreographic process

Presented by DanceWorks, in collaboration with Meaningful Movement, Sara Porter Productions and Nina Milanovski, and CanAsian Dance, with co-production support from Dancemakers

May 7-10, 2025 at the Theatre Centre in Toronto

Learn More

Open Calls for Artists

Tickets (PWYC) go on sale in April!

About Unfinish / Unfurl

Unfinish / Unfurl is a mini-festival focused on creative practice and choreographic process. We invite dance-makers, dance-enthusiasts, and curious community members to gather, share, question, and learn together. All are welcome regardless of previous experience within and around artistic environments!

Guided by the notion of ‘low stakes, low tech, deep dives, deep breaths’, Unfinish / Unfurl invites activities led by partners to exist in a shared space alongside DanceWorks-curated discussions, workshops, and showings. The mini-festival will gather divergent approaches to conceptualizing, making, practicing, and supporting dance; encouraging the intermingling of communities with shared values of reciprocal exchange and supportive challenge.

The aims of the program are to support the development of new dances by local artists, cultivate dance-making practices for emerging, mid-career and established artists alike, and nurture cross-cultural choreographic literacy amongst audiences. The festival’s structure follows a journey of dance-making from initial understandings of what choreography is/can be, to bringing emerging artists together for improvisational exploration, to nurturing fresh choreographic proposals, and finally showcasing semi-developed works-in-progress.

Artists and audience members alike will be encouraged to see everything as practice, and to the extent possible, focus on the rigour and creativity of artistic interests, instead of ruminating on the various sectoral issues that impact the careers of artists and can so often detract or distract from the work itself.

Stay tuned for a full programming announcement and ticket launch!

Open Calls for Artists

Two of the featured events within Unfinish / Unfurl are currently seeking submissions through separate Open Calls that invite the participation of local artists, with honorariums paid by DanceWorks.

The application deadline for both Open Calls is Tuesday March 18, 2025 at 11:59pm ET.

Photo by Gabrielle Tyrie, featuring: Julianna Heft, Alison Viegas, Nidhi Baadkar, and Leah Wilson.

@profile

Led by Meaningful Movement (Abbey Richens and Zuri Skeete)

Event Date: May 8, 2025, with rehearsal on May 7, and some prior meeting time

Seeking: three Toronto-based emerging dance artists (any style) and one Toronto-based musician who are interested in improvisation and collaboration

Honorarium: $400 CAD per artist

@profile is an immersive dance exhibition featuring four scores of improvised movement in a performance context. The four scores are Artist as Other, as Self, as Group, and as Gallery. These scores transform from co-existing as strangers, to solo introductions, to connecting as a team, and, finally, inviting the audience to be involved. This event prioritizes emerging artists - providing a platform to share their craft and cultivate new relationships.

Previous iterations of @profile have taken place around the G.T.A and have been artistically directed by Abbey Richens thus far, with Zuri Skeete joining as co-facilitator this year. In April 2023, Abbey led the first four events as her senior project at York University. For Abbey, this event emerged out of needs she felt entering the professional dance community in Toronto post-grad; noticing that having space to present work and perform as an emerging artist is difficult to come by. This space has offered community and creative fulfillment for Abbey and 40+ artists from the Greater Toronto area and beyond. 11 events later, they have presented this event in studio spaces, at the Beaches, and cafes. @Profile will have 6 iterations during the 2024/25 season.
Meaningful Movement is an art collective co-founded by Abbey Richens and Zuri Skeete. The pair started this initiative with the aim to bridge different art mediums together and explore making spaces that were specifically curated for emerging artists. Since 2020, Meaningful Movement has evolved from digital to physical spaces, with over 15 events within the G.T.A and surrounding areas. This collective continues to hold space for artists to discover new avenues of their practice and build community. Meaningful Movement is committed to equitable environments where multi-disciplinary work can flourish.

Applications open Feb 25!

Visit MM on Instagram!

For questions and/or accessibility support, please click here to email Abbey Richens and Zuri Skeete.

SHOW UR STUFF

Co-organized by Nina Milanovski & Sara Porter, Produced by Sara Porter Productions

Event Date: May 10, 2025, with rehearsals May 8-9, and some prior meeting time

Seeking: three Toronto-based choreographers (any style, emerging, mid-career or established) with works-in-progress between 5-12 minutes in duration, who are interested in audience feedback and discussion

Honorarium: $500 CAD per lead artist with potential additional amounts depending on the number of performers

SHOW UR STUFF (SUS) is designed to generate and animate curiosities about new ways of thinking, making, seeing, and talking about live physical performance. The event will include works in progress by four choreographers and facilitated audience-choreographer dialogue through mediated conversation. SUS seeks to expand language and promote exchange outside comfort ranges, experiences, and cultural contexts. This iteration will support three choreographic works selected by Sara Porter Productions through this Open Call, and one choreographic work selected by DanceWorks through the Artistic Introductions + Ideas Form.

SHOW UR STUFF offers a supported space to ask the Big Questions: about art, value, meaning, self-understanding, and interpretation. We support the creative appetites of artists and audiences alike. We encourage artistic risk in making work, in revealing ourselves onstage and in community through performance and discussion. We are committed to discover, create, practice and use language to support respectful questioning and challenge to help artists and audiences grow together.
SHOW UR STUFF is interested in Queering and complicating the notion of curating: considering the idea of curating a space that welcomes failure, raw attempts, mistakes, and risk-taking in order to develop community in real time. We welcome performance experiments that are imperfect, incomplete, and “unready”. We welcome artists dedicated to exploring an idea: to attempt “work”, to explore something they’ve never done, or wrestle through an inspirational block.
We recognize that the artistic process is full of ups and downs and believe there is a benefit to working in front of others to address problems in real time. We seek brave artists and audiences to question the process and parameters for artistic value, questioning success and curious about how we can use these questions to create new languages about the work we make and present.
At Sara Porter Productions - we believe that art is for everyone, both to make and to enjoy. We make performance, creative and educational projects that highlight play and exploration, based in personal storytelling. We take a multidisciplinary & inclusive approach to art-making: integrating movement, language, ideas, science and personal experience to build artworks and creative communities that centre on humility, honesty, rigour and investigative play. We centre our work on foregrounding voices that live outside mainstream art communities, including mothers, elderly, Queer and new generation voices. The company’s work is informed by feminist and Queer perspectives.
Rooted in company director Sara Porter’s experiential and academic studies in literature, dance, cultural studies, music, sport, and science, Sara Porter Productions takes an inclusive – and broad-reaching - approach to art-making and sharing.
Sara Porter has 30 years experience as a dance educator, teaching both creative and theoretical approaches to contemporary dance in colleges and universities in Canada and Scotland. An innovative and popular teacher, she has advised, consulted and created new contemporary dance curriculum for professional professional training programs and university departments in Canada and Scotland. She has taught professional artists, university students, and dancers of all ages from teens to seniors through courses in contemporary dance, improvisation, choreography, history, criticism and cultural theory.
Nina Milanovski is a contemporary dance artist and producer based in Toronto. A graduate of the York University Dance program, Nina specialized in choreography and performance. As an emerging artist, Nina has had the pleasure of creating numerous live works and dance films that explore universal themes including love, identity and grief. Looking forward, Nina is excited to develop her one-woman show, “Good Girl”, which investigates the intersections of queer shame and perfectionism. Learn more at www.ninamilanovski.com and follow @ninamilanovski on Instagram for updates on new works and performance opportunities.