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. This one is all about looking forward: Discover Toronto’s next great contemporary dancers, emerging stars of Indigenous Old Style and Contemporary Jingle Dance, a Luminato 2026 preview, 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:
Timed entry tickets let you control your experience - stay for a single performance or the entire show. Enter at your selected time, move through the space, take photos with your friends, grab a drink, and enjoy performances by artists on the forefront of dance.
Entry 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
Featuring performances by...
FFDN Scholar-in-Residence and Artist-in-Residence dive into the relationship between blindness and dance. Following months of collaboration and research, Esie Mensah will perform a solo accompanied by 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.
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.
On September 27th, Fall for Dance North will present Tkaranto Open III, a powwow-style competition featuring Old Style and Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Jingle Dress (Co-presented with Union & TO Live). Champions will return to the festival to showcase their extraordinary artistry with the accompaniment of live music.
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