Amanda Acorn

Amanda Acorn is a choreographer and artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. Her practice includes somatic movement, improvisation, writing, and drawing as tools to explore the body as an empathetic and malleable system, wired for attunement. As a choreographer she creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for shared, embodied exchange. Her latest project, no place (2022), explores the body in dialogue with the material world through emergent, relational practice and an evolving construction of space and place. She is a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts (2000), the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Training Program (2008), and pursued independent studies in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Genoa. Amanda danced and performed independently in Toronto, Montréal, and Calgary before joining Dancemakers as a company artist in 2012. Under the direction of Michael Trent, the company’s collaborative approach to creating deeply informed her processual, research-based, choreographic ethos. Her first group work multiform(s) (2015), received critical acclaim and was awarded the Canadian Stage Award for Direction at SummerWorks Performance Festival, before remounts were subsequently presented in Montréal at the Festival TransAmériques (2016), Hamilton and Toronto in collaboration with the Music Gallery, and Dancemakers (2018). Her solo and group works have included presentations and commissions shared in diverse venues in Toronto including Toronto Dance Theatre, Videofag, The Citadel, Luminato Festival, among others and across Canada at the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, Workers Arts Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Festival of New Dance in St John’s, Dancer’s Studio West in Calgary, Push Festival, and Gold Saucer Studio in Vancouver. Amanda is a passionate facilitator of movement and works to build spaces for care through the intersections of her art practice and her work as a movement guide, teaching contemporary techniques, improvisation and Pilates to adults, professionals, and students. She is currently furthering her study of the dialogue between bodies as an MA candidate at York University, and the practice of Gestalt Psychotherapy through the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.