Taiwan's Hung Dance, Australia's Stephanie Lake Company, and more as DanceHouse unveils 2025-26 season

Offerings also include Hungary’s circus-dance company Recirquel, as well as Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté’s visually striking take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Stephanie Lake Company’s *Manifesto*. Photo by Roy VanDerVegt

Guillaume Côté and Lukas Malkowski in *Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.* Photo by Roman Boldyrev

A DANCE-SPECTACLE version of Hamlet and a Hungarian circus troupe are on the roster as DanceHouse has just unveiled its 2025-26 season.

Kicking off the season October 24 and 25 at the Vancouver Playhouse is Montreal’s Daniel Léveillé Danse (DLD) with Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts), featuring nude dancers against a score of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, pop music, and birdsong. The celebration of the body and pure movement won the Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal in 2017.

That’s followed November 28 and 29 by Taiwan’s Hung Dance, presenting Birdy—a show centred around the lingzi headpiece of long pheasant tail feathers, familiar from traditional Chinese opera. In this presentation with community partner Asian-Canadian Special Events Association, the work draws on martial arts and traditional Peking opera to create a call for freedom.

In the new year, DanceHouse and The Cultch present Paradisum by Hungary’s Recirquel, January 21 to 24 at the Vancouver Playhouse in a North American premiere. The circus-dance work conjures a post-apocalyptic world using everything from a rippling black drape to a ladder to create otherworldly scenography.

At the same venue, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by Ex Machina and Côté Danse, will finally make its B.C. premiere March 19 to 21, 2026, in a presentation with community partner Bard on the Beach. The strikingly atmospheric, wordless take on Shakespeare’s classic debuted in Toronto last year and was created by visionaries Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté. National Ballet of Canada alumnus Côté takes the role of the titular prince, with Lepage bringing a sense of visual spectacle to the candelabra-filled setting.

The season wraps April 16 to 18, 2026 with Manifesto by Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company. Copresented with Vancouver New Music at the Playhouse, the piece features nine drummers performing atop a raised, pink-curtained platform while nine white-clad dancers move against their wall of rhythmic sound. Dance Australia called it “an hour of ecstatic dance” that “feels like a kinaesthetic essay on humanity’s intrinsic relationship to rhythm”.

Subscriptions for past subscribers are on sale April 1 and for new subscribers on April 22. Choose Your Own Four packages are on sale May 13, and single tickets are on sale May 27. Find more info here.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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