In Holla Jazz’s latest work, a room of one’s own becomes a collective space for dance, memory, and legacy.
For award-winning choreographer Natasha Powell, the world premiere of The Room Upstairs is the culmination of ten years of shaping a distinct choreographic voice rooted in Black jazz vernacular dance. At the same time, it’s a renewed inquiry into how that language can express the expansive legacy of saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. “The development of this project began in 2018, when I was initially curious about interpreting Coltrane’s music through choreography,” Powell explains. “The original presentation date of this project was April 2020. We were 2 weeks shy of opening before the world went into lockdown.”
Instead of delay, what happened was a deepening. “It was during the pandemic where I had the space to further reflect on the ideas that inspire my work as a choreographer—supporting emotion, community, intimacy, and location,” she says. This period of reflection shifted her focus toward the intimate: specifically the porous boundary between the personal and the artistic. “Remaining intrigued about creating to the music of Coltrane, I became more interested in John’s creative space in the home, and his personal and professional relationships,” she notes—a turn that anchors the work in solitude, as well as the networks of connection that sustain artistic life.
Drawing on texts ranging from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space to Coltrane’s own interviews, Powell began to shape what she calls a “loose theme”, grounded in both research and instinct. That thematic core finds expression in a work that resists biography in favour of atmosphere. The Room Upstairs is less about recounting the details of Coltrane’s life than about inhabiting the conditions of his creativity. Set to a live score featuring works such as “Giant Steps,” “Naima,” and “My Favourite Things,” which is performed by a six-piece ensemble, the piece unfolds as a kinetic meditation on process: how sound becomes feeling, and feeling becomes movement. Through the vocabulary of Black vernacular dances, including jazz and lindy hop, the choreography ruminates on the inspirational beauty of Coltrane’s creative process, honed in the upstairs room of his family home.
“I don’t think I could do a Coltrane project without these iconic works!” Powell says of the score. “Dance is my artistic language, so selecting pieces of his that inspired movement for me was a priority.” The structure emerged dramaturgically, through sensation: “The first half of the work has an energetic spark, while the latter part of the work offers more introspection, so the arrangement of the music selection was based on that arc.”
If the music provides the piece’s spine, Powell’s choreographic vocabulary gives the work its distinct texture. Over the past decade, Holla Jazz has carved out a vital space on Canadian stages by centring Black jazz vernacular dances—forms often sidelined or flattened in contemporary concert dance—and placing them in dialogue with new compositional structures. For Powell, this is not an aesthetic choice, so much as an embodied one.
“The intersection in which we work is a reflection of my embodied experience as a dancer working within the continuum of black-American vernacular dances,” she explains. Over time, that practice has sharpened: “My confidence and the clarity of our aesthetic has grown over the years. Being more clear and confident about our choreographic language has helped me shape the overall arc of this work.”
That clarity arrives at a moment of serendipity. The premiere coincides with both Holla Jazz’s 10th anniversary and the centenary of Coltrane’s birth—a pairing that might suggest heightened pressure. However, Powell frames it differently. “This project happening at this moment of convergence was the result of divine timing,” she says. “Outside of these milestones, John Coltrane is a musical giant, so the responsibility to take care of this music and propose a delivery system that offers it a new energy is present, no matter what the moment is.”
This responsibility extends beyond the stage to a larger mission: “Jazz dance education is important and always urgent for me: helping people understand that this practice is a living and breathing art form that people are still actively doing around the world,” she says. Her ambitions for Holla Jazz’s future reflect that urgency: “I want to be in music spaces more. I don’t want our work to be limited to concert dance stages, so I’m envisioning different spaces and delivery methods for how we share our work.”
She’s earned this ambition. A Toronto-based choreographer with a 20-year career in dance, Powell has built Holla Jazz into an award-winning company known for presenting historical jazz dances through a contemporary lens. In addition to The Room Upstairs and the Dora Mavor Moore Award-winning Floor’d, her credits include Margarita (Fall for Dance North) and collaborations with National Ballet of Canada and Canadian Stage. She is the recipient of the 2023 Johanna Metcalf Prize in the Performing Arts. (Read more in this previous profile of Powell with Sesaya Arts Magazine.)
So at its most immediate, The Room Upstairs offers dance audiences a direct invitation. “I think there are a lot of folks that don’t think about dancing to jazz music,” Powell notes. “So my hope is, at the very least, to spark an interest that gets them to understand that movement is also a part of the jazz tradition/culture”. “The Room Upstairs” may have its origins as a private space of creation—but through her choreography, Powell seeks to make it a shared environment: where audiences not only listen, but watch… and feel the music move.
The Room Upstairs runs April 29–May 2, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. at Winchester Street Theatre, presented by Holla Jazz in partnership with DanceWorks and Toronto Dance Theatre. Tickets and more information are available at hollajazz.com and tdt.org.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
