DOUBLE BILL

Presented by City of Toronto in partnership with TOES FOR DANCE, with support from LAKESHORE ARTS and ĀNANDAṀ.

Two new compelling dance works in one exhilarating programme:

Veiled Venom by Kiera Breaugh, and Ostinati by Boys’ Club Tap Dance Collective.

Friday, November 7, 2025 at 8PM, followed by a post-show reception

Saturday, November 8, 2025 at 3PM, followed by a post-show Artist Talk/Q&A

80 minutes including a brief intermission

Assembly Hall in Etobicoke

1 Colonel Samuel Smith Park Drive, Etobicoke, Toronto, ON M8V 4B6

Ticket options range from $10-45, plus HST and can be purchased here. We invite audience members to choose the price level that aligns with their circumstance using the guidelines provided. If you need a free $0 ticket, please email info@toesfordance.ca. A limited number of $0 free tickets are available for each performance.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS!

Ostinati by Boys’ Club Tap Dance Collective is a lively and thought-provoking piece that explores the cycles we live through; personal, emotional, societal, and existential. From the passing of time to recurring doubts, this work - rooted in tap dance and jazz music - investigates how patterns shape our identity, challenge our growth, and influence how we move through the world. The dancers, Veronica Simpson, Laura Donaldson, and Elise McGrenera, each offer a personal vignette that reflects a cycle that they feel trapped within. The piece includes live original music by Alexa Belgrave (piano) and Ale Nuñez (voice). Ostinati is a celebration of community and solidarity among female-identifying artists.

Ostinati by Boys’ Club Tap Dance Collective is a lively and thought-provoking piece that explores the cycles we live through; personal, emotional, societal, and existential. From the passing of time to recurring doubts, this work uses tap dance and jazz music to investigate how patterns shape our identity, challenge our growth, and influence how we move through the world. Set on a stage divided into four quadrants, the piece revolves - physically and thematically.
Each dancer presents a personal vignette that reflects a cycle they feel trapped within, attempting to break free. Elise McGrenera explores the frustration of feeling left behind in life, year after year hoping for change that never seems to come. Veronica Simpson reveals the pressure to constantly reinvent herself out of fear that stillness will lead to irrelevance. Laura Donaldson faces the fear of getting stuck and holding herself back, of missing her moment, and the tension between personal ambition and societal expectations around womanhood, and success.
This piece consists of original music and original arrangements by Alexa Belgrave (Music Director/Composer/Piano) and Ale Nuñez (Lyricist/Composer/Vocal) as well as Veronica, Laura, and Elise. With shifting time signatures, varied textures, and cyclical forms, the music mirrors the dancers' emotional landscapes—at times propelling them forward, at other times pulling them back into the loop.
While each story is rooted in individual experience, Ostinati speaks to a shared human truth: the cycles we resist are often the very ones that define us. Through movement and connection, the dancers express the weight of these recurring struggles and the power found in confronting them together. This rhythmic and introspective piece is a celebration of community among female-identifying artists – a space to hold each other through the heaviness, and to emerge with deeper empathy and renewed strength.
Boys' Club Tap Dance Collective is a dynamic trio of women tap dancers comprising Veronica Simpson (NYC), Laura Donaldson (Calgary), and Elise McGrenera (Toronto). Co-founded in May 2022 during a residency at tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), the collective quickly gained recognition. In 2023, Boys’ Club returned to Europe to present a full-length work at The Claquettes Club (Belgium) and at Golem’s Theatre (Barcelona). In May 2024, Boys’ Club was featured again at The Claquettes Club and in tanzhaus nrw’s Tap Ahead Festival. Most recently, Boys’ Club performed an excerpt of their work in New York City at Dormeshia’s Ladies in the Shoe Conference. Currently, Boys’ Club is developing ‘Ostinati’ to premiere in Toronto in November 2025 through the TOES FOR DANCE Process+Practice Residency program in partnership with Assembly Hall/the City of Toronto. Throughout their work, Boys' Club has been welcomed as a company-in-residence at renowned spaces including tanzhaus nrw, Leña Artist Residency, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, and The Claquettes Club.

Veiled Venom by Kiera Breaugh is a raw and poetic exploration of female rage; expressing its volatility and its misunderstood power through spoken word and contemporary movement with Hip Hop influences. Drawing from personal experience and the collective memory of Kiera and collaborator/performers Kiah Francis and Claire Whitaker, Veiled Venom embodies anger not as something to be suppressed or pathologized, but as a force of clarity, resistance, and survival. Based on themes of death and rebirth of the female spirit, Veiled Venom exposes the ways women’s anger is often policed, minimized, or feared, and reclaims it as both an intimate truth and a radical act.

Veiled Venom by Kiera Breaugh is a raw and poetic exploration of female rage; expressing its volatility and its misunderstood power through spoken word and contemporary movement with Hip Hop influences. Drawing from personal experience and the collective memory of Kiera and collaborator/performers Kiah Francis and Claire Whitaker, Veiled Venom embodies anger not as something to be suppressed or pathologized, but as a force of clarity, resistance, and survival.
Using themes of death and rebirth of the female spirit, the piece moves through the shifting textures of rage: the sharpness of words unsaid, the exhaustion of being unheard. It looks at the stages of womanhood - from the vulnerability of naivety, through the exhaustion demanded by women’s labor, to the isolation of the wise elder woman - and explores how rage manifests differently within each of these phases.
Through movement, text, and atmosphere, the piece exposes the ways women’s anger is often policed, minimized, or feared, and reclaims it as both an intimate truth and a radical act. Rather than offering resolution, it sits inside the discomfort—making space for our anger to be expressed and seen in all its rawness, vulnerability, and transformative possibility.
Kiera Breaugh is a dancer/choreographer whose style lives at the intersection of contemporary and hip hop. Kiera has a BA in Dance from LMU in Los Angeles. While in LA, she was a member of LA dance companies: the Young Lions, Immabeast, Immabreathe and MashUp Contemporary Dance Company. Kiera has performed in Dance Matters, A Woman's Work, the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Orlando Fringe Festival, the Vancouver Fringe Festival and Dusk Dances, Hamilton. She has choreographed for PRESENCE, a site specific series commissioned by Peggy Baker Dance Productions, ProArteDanza in their Choreolab, and an original piece during the half-time of a Raptors Game. Kiera has completed the Hicks Choreography Fellows Program through Jacob’s Pillow and is a Process+Practice residency artist at Assembly Hall through TOES FOR DANCE and the City of Toronto. Kiera has worked with and danced for artists including Ian Eastwood, Brian Friedman, Janelle Ginestra, Kylie Thompson, Mary Ann Chavez and Monika Felice Smith. Her work often explores themes such as racial identity, female upward mobility, and other ideas that aim to empower the unheard.

Cast and Artistic Credits

Ostinati

Dancers/Choreographers: Laura Donaldson, Elise McGrenera, Veronica Simpson

Music Director/Composer: Alexa Belgrave

Lyricist/Composer: Ale Nuñez

Veiled Venom

Choreographer/Dancer: Kiera Breaugh

Dancers/Collaborators: Claire Whitaker, Kiah Francis

Audience Warnings

There are currently no audience warnings for this performance. A minimal theatrical haze may be used to enhance the lighting design (TBC).

Accessibility

Assembly Hall is fully accessible. An elevator is onsite for access to the second floor Performance Hall, and accessible parking is available both at the front of Assembly Hall and in the Green P Parking lot (located on the south side of Assembly Hall). An accessible washroom is also available.

Directions + Parking

Click here for a Google Map.

Public Transit: Take the 44 or 944 Bus south from Kipling Subway Station, or take the 507 Streetcar from Long Branch GO Station.

Parking: A Green P Parking lot is located on the south side of Assembly Hall, just a 1 minute walk from the venue. Click here for a Google Map. Please note: The parking directly in front of Assembly Hall is very limited and reserved for staff.