RONALD TAYLOR DANCE
Founded in 1993 by Artistic Director Ronald A. Taylor, Ronald Taylor Dance (formerly Canboulay Dance Theatre) is a Toronto-based company dedicated to the evolution of Caribbean-rooted contemporary movement. The company’s signature technique, the Dingolay Dance Technique, coined by Taylor, draws from Trinidadian parlance (“to dance with joyful abandon”) and fuses Caribbean folk, modern and ballet. Rooted in Caribbean rhythms and rituals, the technique embraces Africanist aesthetics (grounded movement, polycentric awareness, improvisation and call-and-response), while maintaining classical and modern training rigour. The movement vocabulary emphasizes groundedness, fluidity, polyrhythm, improvisation and circular phrasing, reflecting both ancestral traditions and contemporary innovation. As a training practice, Dingolay develops musicality, alignment and expressive freedom, teaching dancers to embody discipline and abandon while honouring cultural memory.
Over its three-decade history, the company has premiered a robust repertoire including works such as MASS (A Spiritual Journey to the Creator Within), Maljo, In the Depths of My Palais, He…Moves (a 2005 world-premiere celebrating black male dancers) and most recently Psychosis (2019) and And Still We Risz (2022).
The 1998 full-length work MASS with commissioned music by award-winning composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen was selected by NOW Toronto as one of the top ten dance performances of the year.
The company has engaged in teaching and mentorship platforms across Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Most notably, a 2025 mentorship residency at the Nia Centre for the Arts in Toronto; dance residencies at Claude Watson Secondary Arts Program; collaborations with theatre and dance schools in Trinidad & Tobago; and a recent collaboration with National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) in Detroit, Michigan.
Artistic Director Taylor has been recognized for his contributions: he was awarded an Artist Fellowship from the Djerassi Residents Artists Foundation (California) and received the 2024 Finalist designation from the Toronto Arts Foundation, where the assessment noted his “extensive and incredible body of work” and community-engagement resonance.
The company’s technique, Dingolay, is being actively taught in community workshops and preview events (for instance October 2025’s Dingolay community workshop at the Nia Centre), bringing the company’s ethos of expressive freedom and cultural memory to broader publics.
Internationally, the company’s Artistic Director has had a body of work and teaching opportunities with performances and residencies in Canada, the Caribbean, Senegal, and South Africa, solidifying the company’s diasporic storytelling roots and cultural mobility.
As Ronald Taylor Dance continues to develop new works, engage in cross-cultural collaborations and deepen its educational outreach, the company remains committed to challenging audiences, training the next generation of artists, and sustaining a dynamic fusion of Caribbean heritage with Canadian contemporary dance. Audiences, collaborators and students alike are invited to join in the journey of movement, memory and meaning.
MISSION
Ronald Taylor Dance mission is to provoke critical thinking with his audiences and to push the choreographic boundaries through Contemporary Canadian Caribbean dance and collaborate with diverse ethno-cultural artists. The company plays an important role in preserving the diasporic storytelling tradition within an ever evolving Canadian society. He uses every opportunity to share lived experiences, knowledge and traditions to show the connectives of all communities.
VISION
Ronald Taylor Dance continues to educate, engage and empower all generations. All performances allow audiences to question their relationship to each other in a global context. He continues to foster cross-cultural collaborations using contemporary and traditional dance techniques. Taylor offer audiences the very best of dance performances that challenge the mind, open the heart and lift the spirit.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ronald Taylor Dance acknowledges that the land we gather on is the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. This includes the many peoples, named and unnamed, who have stewarded this land before our arrival.
The territory is the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably care for and share the resources around the Great Lakes.
We are Treaty Peoples, including those of us who came here as immigrants and contributors to care for the land like it’s our own either in this generation or in generations past and just like many of our Ancestors who came here through the confines of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
We are grateful to be able to share this space with so many knowledge-keepers, including the courageous and phenomenal artists with whom Ronald Taylor Dance collaborates every day.
