Belle Spirale Dance Projects announces 2026-27 season that features European debut and The Little Match Girl with live choral music

September’s Censored Opera Festival in Helsinki is followed by collaboration with Vancouver Chamber Choir in November

Belle Spirale’s Marisa Gold and Brenna Metzmeier. Photo by Sylvain Senez

VANCOUVER’S BELLE SPIRALE Dance Projects has just unveiled a 2026–27 season that opens with two world premieres in Helsinki and includes a major new work with a live performance by the Vancouver Chamber Choir.

From September 11 to 19, Belle Spirale hits the Censored Opera Festival in Finland’s capital, where the troupe will make its European debut. The two works are created with re:Naissance Opera, Fractal Arts Collective, and new coproducers Ensemble Nylandia. Choreographed by Alexis Fletcher in collaboration with Belle Spirale artists Brenna Metzmeier and Nathan Coburn, both pieces blend Baroque opera, contemporary dance, and technology to explore identity, solidarity, and self-expression beyond binaries.

Next up is the season’s signature production, The Little Match Girl, coproduced and performed with the Vancouver Chamber Choir and premiering November 13 and 14 at the Vancouver Playhouse. The full-evening reimagining of David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize–winning choral composition The Little Match Girl Passion features 16 singers performing onstage, alongside all 10 Belle Spirale’s core group of dancers (Ariana Barr, Nathan Coburn, Juan Duarte, Emma Galvin, Marisa Gold, Will Jessup, Sophia Makarenko, Brenna Metzmeier, Justin Rapaport, and Lazaro Silva). Kevin O’Day choreographs, while Kari Turunen conducts. The production supports Covenant House Vancouver.

In March, the company tours its commission Tuning, created and directed by Action at a Distance’s Vanessa Goodman, to Salt Spring Island, Montreal, and Quebec City. The piece features dancers Alexis Fletcher and Ryan Jackson.

The season closes withtwo new works at Calgary’s DJD Dance Centre, June 4 to 7, deepening Belle Spirale’s artistic partnership with Calgary’s Ballet Bodies YYC. One piece is a world premiere—a 25-minute duet created for Calgary-based artists Serenella Sol and Beth Durnie. The second is a new commission that bringstogether professional dancers from Vancouver and Calgary, created by Alexis Fletcher and Sylvain Senez in collaboration with the artists.

And summer will bring the return of the company’s casual Dance Deck in Senez and Fletcher’s backyard—a mixed program of performances of the kind that just ended this year’s edition on the East Side.

Find more information and links to tickets for some of the shows here.

Belle Spirale’s Will Jessup and Sophia Makarenko. Photo by Sylvain Senez

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is a Webster Award–winning arts journalist who has spent more than three decades immersed in Vancouver’s performing arts, film, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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