Co.ERASGA
Eternal Gestures, Alvin Erasga Tolentino. Photo by Yasuhiro Okada
Contemporary, progressive, and provocative.
Founded by choreographer and dancer Alvin Erasga Tolentino in 2000, Co.ERASGA has a distinguished international reputation with its vision of hybrid dance, diversity, and collaborations with other artistic practices and multimedia.
At the heart of Co.ERASGA is Artistic Director Alvin Erasga Tolentino, a Filipino-Canadian artist of remarkable commitment, talent, and energy, whose diverse cultural background and heritage are a driving force for much of the company’s work.
In addressing themes that reflect Tolentino’s individuality, global awareness, and ethnicity, Co.ERASGA exposes and explores issues of cultural identity, gender, hybridity, and community engagements and promotes cross-cultural dialogue.
For more than two decades, Co.ERASGA has created critically acclaimed contemporary dance productions that have toured to Asia, Europe, South America, and Canada to over 65 different cities in the last decade. Full-length works include: SOLA, BATO/Stone, MINORI, Volt, She Said, Field, OrienTik/ Portrait, BODYGlass, PARADISE/Paradis, ADAMEVE/Man-Woman, Shadow Machine, EXpose, Unwrapping Culture, Collected, Traces and Still Here, Passages of Rhythms and Offering, during the pandemic.
Eternal Gestures is Co.ERASGA’s most important visionary work to date in anticipation of the company’s 25th anniversary season and celebration of its landmark year. The commission and collaboration with contemporary Indigenous Coast Salish–based choreographers Michelle Olson, Starr Muranko, and Margaret Grenier will see its world premiere in October 2025 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, with the presentation of this full-length solo project. Tolentino personally chose to work with these three distinguished choreographers to continue and deepen his artistic relation to each artist and to be guided and influenced further by Indigenous land-based practices, preservation of heritage, and a greater understanding toward the need and importance of Indigenous and contemporary arts creations and offerings. For Tolentino the project goes beyond the embodiment and expression of dancing but also towards personal inquiry, spiritual journey as a matured artist, a migrant visitor and land settler living in the Coast Salish territories, by giving back and honouring the land he inhabits.
