Mandate and Vision

Dreamwalker Dance Company facilitates the creation, production and sharing of art that explores and interprets the human experience so that artists and audiences alike can connect, awaken and feel empowered. Dreamwalker Dance Company is our bridge to the soul, and dance is our medium. Our mandate specifically includes strengthening connections between culturally diverse and multigenerational artists and audiences. Artistic excellence is at the core of all our practices, activities, and repertoire.

Our vision can be summed up in three words: engage, exchange, experience. Our collaborative work opens doors within ourselves and between each other. Our repertoire raises issues of humanity and the choices that people make. We are dedicated to offering individuals a vehicle for expression, a ‘voice’. Together we explore what it is to be human.

Dreamwalker’s vision is shaped by Artistic Director Andrea Nann; essentially, she is constantly asking the question: “what moves you?”, centered around the concept of The Conscious Body. Andrea has cultivated a sophisticated capacity for ‘any body’ to access states of awareness and awakened presence that she calls The Conscious Body. In this fluid state, one can increase the potential for communication and originality. True interconnectedness emerges and groups of people can share experiences in a deeply spontaneous and creative way. Artists, collaborators, participants, organizational partners and ticket-holders alike experience our work through direct and indirect connections to their own bodies, sensations, imagination, creativity, memory, emotion, intuition and intellect.

History and programming

Dreamwalker Dance Company was founded in 2005 and celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015. Since inception, Dreamwalker has been engaged in creating and touring a diverse repertoire of integrated dance works for stage, film, video, academic forum and gallery installation. Long-term relationships across Ontario and in British Columbia have resulted in major company partnerships, residencies, productions, co-productions, tours and commissions. Each year, we produce new works, performances, and outreach activities. Many of our collaborators work repeatedly with us and we have engaged over 500 different Canadian artists and shared dance-based practices with over 13,000 workshop participants including school age children, senior citizens, public service employees, educators, and academics.

“The Whole Shebang”, our signature event now in its ninth edition, is an interdisciplinary arts ‘feast’ that has presented and provides opportunities to over 265 local emerging and established artists to share their work as part of a curated performance experience. “The Whole Shebang” has also matured into a dynamic community engagement model. We have developed a unique multi-year, movement centered, collaborative creation process that we call The Shebang Process. The Shebang Process is now active in multiple regions across Southern Ontario (Kingston area, Wellington, Halton, Hamilton-Wentworth, Peel, and Niagara - collectively referred to as “The Ontario Shebang”), and, with generous support from Ontario Arts Council-Ontario Dances and Ontario Trillium Foundation, provides multiple community engagement opportunities for over 30 artists and presentation opportunities for over 90 artists and approximately 250 community participants from Kingston, Guelph, St Catharines and Burlington/Hamilton.