Ripe fruit isn’t an accident. It’s tended, cultivated, anticipated – until the precise moment it’s ready to be shared. That metaphor sits at the heart of the inaugural Ripe Fruit Dance Festival, a new Fringe-style contemporary dance showcase taking over VideoCabaret, in collaboration with Rough House Dance, from February 12–15. The celebration of contemporary dance, featuring works by five Toronto-based artists and companies, positions itself as both a response to scarcity and a celebration of abundance in Toronto’s dance ecosystem.
Curated by dancers and choreographers Alli Carry and Rumi Jeraj, Ripe Fruit emerges from a reality many in the city’s dance community recognize all too well. “Often, the most useful thing for artists is the time and resources to create the works they’ve been dreaming of,” Jeraj explains. “However, as creation opportunities in the city have been growing, it can sometimes feel like presentation opportunities are not.” With the Toronto Fringe offering just three dance slots in the entire festival last year, he saw the urgent need for another small artist-run dance festival.
Growing a festival
The original seed was planted by an unexpected source: VideoCabaret’s Artistic Director Anand Rajaram. “Anand reached out in August with the idea of collaborating on a dance fringe fest of sorts,” Carry recalls. “From there, I invited Rumi to come help me out because I knew it would be a big job.” For Carry, the timing was ” just right” because her personal situation perfectly illustrated the squeeze: “I’d been itching to present a work that I started developing in 2022 titled A subject., which I had not yet had a chance to share publicly in its fully developed form.”
This convergence of need, opportunity and momentum have shaped Ripe Fruit’s format. Ripe Fruit describes itself as showcasing modern dance artists working at a professional level, and offering a snapshot of work that has been deeply researched and is now ready for presentation. The event features works by Carry, Neena Jayarajan, Emily Duckett, Angela Blumberg and Justin Fraser. Each piece is approximately 30 minutes long and will be performed multiple times over the weekend, allowing audiences to choose how they wish to experience this compact lineup that promises variety, creative risk, and immediacy. They can see one performance for $19.78 or a full evening/matinee program (3 of the 5 festival shows) for $45.60 (tax and fees included). Artists receive direct ticket revenue, making attendance a meaningful way to support the creators and their practices.
Carry and Jeraj explain that selection for the inaugural lineup was intentionally hybrid. “Two of the artists being presented were selected by a jury of our peers, two were pulled from a hat, and in the agreement to produce the festival, Alli’s work [A subject] is also being presented,” says Jeraj. The blend of curation and chance reflects the festival’s ethos: balancing care with openness, and excellence with access. It also reflects the pragmatic realities of producing dance in Toronto: “With dedicated dance spaces in the city closing, or being in a sort of limbo, such as Dance Makers and The Fleck,” Jeraj notes, “as a community, we have been searching for alternate spaces to present dance.”
Planting it at VideoCabaret
When Rajaram proposed VideoCabaret, “it felt like a good fit!” – particularly because of its configuration. “VideoCab is a special venue for this festival because it’s so intimate and also set up in a thrust,” Carry notes. “This is something that I haven’t seen a lot of in the Toronto contemporary dance community, and I think it will really help to pull audiences into the work. I hope it makes them feel like they are a part of it, and that their presence and engagement with the work are integral.”
Rajaram, for his part, sees the festival as aligned with VideoCabaret’s larger mission. “As artistic director, my primary job is to create opportunities for artists,” he explains. Clear-eyed about the fact that “dance spaces were becoming increasingly limited in the city,” he approached Carry and Jeraj with the idea – and then trusted them to shape it. He describes the work audiences will encounter as unified by spirit, rather than style: “The choreographers have unique voices, and their dancers embody that free spirit and poetic movement I love so much about dance.”
And Rajam loves the festival’s name – which is “playful, visceral, and [one that] promises delectable art.”
Plucking, serving and savouring
The name “Ripe Fruit” perfectly encapsulates this moment of readiness. “So much strong work lives quietly in years of research and development, yet never reaches a wider audience,” Carry explains. “We wanted the name to speak to work that has been cultivated over time, with care and intention, and is now at its peak, ready to be consumed.” Jeraj frames it similarly: “The choreographers and dancers in these works have been tending to them through rehearsal processes and creative research. They are now ripe and ready to be shared with an audience.”
As a first-year festival, the curators are not looking to hard metrics for validation. For Carry, success is orchestrating “a fulfilling experience for the choreographers and dancers involved, and hopefully an audience of people who are interested in contemporary dance.” Jeraj is looking for green shoots of growth: “If someone who has never experienced the magic of live performance or contemporary dance shows up to the festival – and is curious, excited or challenged by what they have seen – then I would consider the festival a success.”
Both curators are clear-eyed about who they’re inviting in – especially theatre audiences who may feel unsure about dance. Carry makes the case directly: “Contemporary dance has so much to offer theatre audiences… There are often rich, complex inner worlds within the performers… and a level of abstraction that invites the audience to become active participants.” And Jeraj speaks to the countercultural act of attention itself: “The act of coming to the theatre, sitting for 30 minutes uninterrupted and seeing something which you get to make sense of, or let wash over you, can be an experience of peace and togetherness that’s sometimes lacking in city life.”
Bottom line: no expertise is required for Ripe Fruit: just curiosity. As Jeraj notes, “Dance asks only that you show up and experience.” Ripe Fruit Dance Festival, presented by Rough House Dance and VideoCabaret, runs February 12 – 15, 2026 at VideoCabaret’s Deanne Taylor Theatre. The full schedule and tickets are available at videocab.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
