Internationally acclaimed tap artist Travis Knights has captivated audiences from Shanghai and Paris to New York and Vancouver. His career spans film, stage, and original productions, including principal roles in Bojangles and Happy Feet, collaborations with Cirque du Soleil, performances with Tap Dogs, and appearances at the 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

As a creator, Travis has developed works like Ephemeral Artifacts, the Legacy Series: Tap Dance Symposium, and his full-length original production The Mars Project, blending tap, live music, and storytelling. He also performed alongside trumpeter Theo Croker in Jazz is Dead — a world premiere co-commissioned by dance Immersion and Luminato Festival, fusing jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and live improvisation.

A Jacqueline Lemieux Prize and Dora Award recipient, he continues to innovate as a performer and advocate for tap. His latest tour-ready work, Travis Knights in Concert, continues his legacy of innovation on stage.

Jaberi Dance Theatre is an award-winning company creating contemporary dance-theatre under the leadership of Artistic Director Roshanak Jaberi. The company produces original, cross-disciplinary works that center women's experiences and stories of marginalization, shaped by research and collaborative practice. JDT brings together artists, activists, scholars, and community leaders to create visually striking, thought-provoking performances that spark dialogue and reflection.

Their latest tour-ready work, Architecture of Violence, explores the intersection of space, power, and human experience — examining how the built environment can become a tool of surveillance and control, and a witness to resilience. Commissioned by Scenkonst Sörmland, the production premiered and toured in Sweden in 2024 and will premiere in Canada in 2026.

With a growing national and international presence, the company's repertoire spans stage productions, films, site-specific works, and digital exhibitions, alongside workshops and community initiatives.

Esie Mensah is an award-winning choreographer, director, dancer, and TEDx speaker whose work spans dance, theatre, opera, and film. She has collaborated with artists including Rihanna, Drake, and Nelly Furtado, and her choreography has graced the stages of Soulpepper, Obsidian, the Shaw Festival, and the Stratford Festival. Her work has toured nationally and internationally, with credits ranging from Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha: A Musical Reimagining to a residency at Fall for Dance North in 2025.

Her latest work, ZAYO, is an Afrofusion dance-theatre production conceived over eight years — a memoir shaped by Mensah's lived experiences, following a young woman guided by her Ancestors to confront her fears and emerge transformed. ZAYO premiered in Toronto and toured to Milan, Italy.

Meryem Alaoui is a Toronto-based dancer and choreographer from Morocco, and founder and artistic director of Jasad Dance Projects. Her experimental work sits at the intersection of somatic research, movement, and voice — rooted in the reclamation of embodied performance practices and dances from her Moroccan heritage. Through Jasad Dance Projects, she is committed to expanding the presence and creative opportunities for artists from North Africa, the Arab world, the Middle East, and their diasporas.

Her tour-ready works, SAWT and Sand Body, are solo performances based on somatic research through the body and voice, in relation to sensoriality, slowness, and ancestral wisdom. SAWT is an exploration of physical and emotional landscapes rooted in the memory and reinterpretation of devotional traditions of ecstatic embodied presence through a diasporic North African lens.

Sand Body asks questions about the body’s relation to objecthood, the ancestral wisdom of slowness and its potential for a futuristic optimism away from the pressure of capitalist productivity.

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe is an internationally acclaimed choreographer, performer, and teacher known for fusing contemporary dance with African spiritual and cultural practices. Born in Soweto, Johannesburg, his early exposure to traditional healing ceremonies — led by his Sangoma grandmother, mother, and aunts — deeply informed his movement vocabulary and artistic vision. His Afro-fusion style blends African dance forms with global influences, creating spiritually charged works that explore the interconnectedness of humanity, nature, and ancestral memory. His commitment to cultural exchange has taken him through residencies and master classes worldwide, from North America to, Asia, the African Continent,

His latest tour-ready work, Desert Poems draws from the austere beauty and quiet power of extreme landscapes — the scorching sun, the biting wind, the vast emptiness, and the tenacious life that persists within it. Through evocative movement and sound, Vincent S. Mantsoe conjures the colours of the sand, the contours of the dunes, and the profound silence of the night sky. At its heart, the work speaks to resilience, adaptation, and the unbreakable spirit of survival — a meditation on what endures in the harshest of conditions.