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Showtimes & Tickets
Oct 22 at 7:30PM | Oct 23 at 7:30PM (Pre-Show Artist Talk at 6:30PM) | Oct 24 at 2:00PM
Running time: 90 mins (including intermission)
Single Tickets: $25.00 base fare (plus applicable fees)
Festival Pass (choose between 4-6 shows): See four or more Festival performances and save 15%! Choose from the six Festival programmes. Packages available while quantities last, so be sure to book early!
Program
Joyfully opening with a sneaker ballet, plunging you into the high emotions of flamenco, and delivering you to a world reimagined, HEAR THE DANCE is a fully sensory dance experience. , Performed by a cast of emerging professional dance artists from the Company Life Program at Canada’s National Ballet School and recent graduates of Toronto Metropolitan University - a first time partnership for these two preeminent dance training institutions, flamenco star Carmen Romero, and an FFDN exclusive collection of ballet dancers from around the world.
The soundscapes of HEAR THE DANCE are created with live accompaniment by international fellows of The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School, the recorded voices of Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize-winning a capella composition, the music of Max Richter, the immersive descriptive audio of Devon Healey and the sounds of bodies in motion.
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Partita by Justin Peck
Canadian Debut
Performed by a group of Toronto’s most exciting emerging artists: recent graduates of Toronto Metropolitan University’s dance program and dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School.
A sneaker ballet from Broadway and New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck, Partita is a folk dance for our times. Celebrating moments of intersection despite life’s angularities, the eight dancers oscillate between solo and unison movements, embodying the a cappella voices of Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition.
Justin Peck is a three-time Tony Award winning director, choreographer, filmmaker, and dancer based in New York City. He is the Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet, and only the second person in the institution’s 75-year history to hold this title. He has developed and created over 50 stage and theater works that have been presented on stages around the world, including Lincoln Center, the Palais Garnier, Sydney Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Broadway: (with Buena Vista Social Club, Illinoise, and Carousel). He choreographed the 2021 film West Side Story in collaboration with director Steven Spielberg.
His creations for the dance world have been performed by companies all over the world, including the Paris Opera Ballet, Australian Ballet, Dresden Semperoper Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, Boston Ballet, Juilliard, The National Ballet of Canada, Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, LA Dance Project, Dutch National Ballet, the School of American Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and Houston Ballet among many others.
Divine Retribution by Carmen Romero
FFDN Original Commission | World Premiere
In Divine Retribution, Flamenco star Carmen Romero enters Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor as though crossing the threshold of a vast cathedral of sound. Within its shadows, she confronts fate, judgment, and sacred fire. Through the percussive language of flamenco — castanets, footwork, breath, stillness, and defiant gesture — Romero becomes both prisoner and force of transformation. The castanets answer Bach’s monumental counterpoint like a second voice: sharp, intricate, and relentles. Divine Retribution places flamenco inside the grandeur of Bach — and sets the cathedral ablaze.
Carmen will be joined on stage by musicians of The Rebanks Family Fellowship and International Performance Residency Program at The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School
Carmen Romero is one of Canada’s most distinctive flamenco artists—an award-winning choreographer, performer, curator, educator, and cultural innovator whose work expands flamenco far beyond convention. Based in Toronto, she has spent more than three decades building a powerful artistic voice rooted in Spanish tradition while pushing the form into contemporary performance, theatrical staging, live music collaboration, and cross-cultural dialogue.
Through Compañía Carmen Romero, she creates work that few artists in Canada are attempting: flamenco as a living, evolving theatrical force where percussive footwork, castanets, song, rhythm, gesture, and dramatic imagery become a complete world on stage. Nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Choreography and recipient of the Muriel Sherrin Award for International Achievement in Dance, Romero has coached and choreographed for an extraordinary range of artists, including Shakira, The National Ballet of Canada, actors, competitive dancers, and vocal artists seeking the power, precision, and presence of flamenco.
Newborn Giants by Robert Binet and Devon Healey
North American Premiere
Newborn Giants casts the dancers as superheroes of sensitivity. There is a tension between what is seen and what is heard that invites your imagination to colour outside the lines. This immersive ballet is developed by choreographer Robert Binet in collaboration with blind theatre artist and disability scholar Dr. Devon Healey, FFDN Scholar-in-Residence 2025-2027.
Healey believes that blindness and dance uniquely connect us to the body, a compelling encouragement to move beyond visual assumptions and experience the world more deeply through feeling and awareness. In Newborn Giants, her philosophy, articulated as Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), is woven through the Max Richter score in Healey’s own voice. IDA poetically blends the physical experience of the dancers, the choreographic intent of the work, and the lived experience of blindness, It creates a parallel sensory pathway that deepens, rather than explains, the performance.
Robert Binet is Artistic Director & Co-CEO of Fall for Dance North, as well as a choreographer who has created works for The National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Ballet, The New York City Ballet and more. Binet trained at Canada’s National Ballet School and spent 11 years with The National Ballet of Canada, beginning as Choreographic Associate and later appointed Director of Artist Development Programmes. He established the NBoC Creative Action program which offers choreographic development opportunities to Canadian choreographers and shares resources with the local dance community. In 2023, Binet was the Choreographic Mentor at the Venice Biennale College Danza and guest curator for the Dance: Made in Canada festival. In the same year, Binet received the Sandra Faire Next Generation Award from Dance Collection Danse, awarded to an individual under 40 who is making a significant impact on dance in Canada.
Dr. Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at OISE, University of Toronto. All of 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). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars (Outside the March/The National Ballet of Canada/Peripheral Theatre) premiered August 2025 in Toronto. Her work exploring blind perception has been featured by The Royal Ballet (UK), the Queensland Ballet (Australia), Vienna State Opera (Austria), and The National Ballet of Canada.