2025 Johannas chair and ceremony host Owen Pallett in front of an image of the 2025 winners and protégés. Photo: Kalila Snow Jan
Performing Arts
Reflections and Updates From Johannas Recipients
2025

Since 2019, the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prizes have recognized Ontario creators making bold contributions across theatre, dance, and music/opera.

We recently invited past winners and protégés to share what they’re noticing in the sector (what’s keeping them up at night?) and what they’re working on now. Their reflections are wide-ranging and rooted in the daily realities of making art: creating through uncertainty, challenging systemic limits, building community, and imagining new ways forward.

 

Adam Francis Proulx
2025 Protégé

“Amid an economic chill, the rise of AI, and increasingly precarious arts funding, the balance between artistic creation and survival administration feels increasingly delicate — but it’s also prompting artists and organizations to focus more sharply on what audiences truly want to see.”

Alice Ping Yee Ho
2019 Winner

“As a Chinese Canadian composer, I’m encouraged to see growing interest in diverse voices and cross-cultural projects, but I still worry about how fragile that progress can be. What keeps me up at night is how to keep my own voice — and those of other Asian Canadian artists — authentic and visible in a field that can still feel uncertain and uneven.”

Bilal Baig
2019 Protégé

“Not enough daring and dangerous and provocative work being programmed at our theatres out of fear. It’s keeping me up at night because we’re stuck in an uninspired and apolitical creative landscape, when artists need to feel free enough to disrupt comfortability so we can have necessary conversations.” 

Dillon Orr
2025 Protégé

“The sector’s obsessed with survival instead of imagination. Everyone’s writing strategic plans when what we need are new myths and collective risk. Artists are exhausted by precarity disguised as opportunity, and we’re re-learning how to build communities of care instead of competition.”

James Rolfe
2019 Winner

“Making music that’s relevant and fresh during times of fast, near-chaotic change is a huge challenge. Yet people continue to have a deep longing for music, and musicians will continue to find creative ways to respond to that need.”

Kevin Lau
2025 Winner

“I’d like to believe that music is a pathway to becoming whole. To me, the increasing pressure on artists — economic and social — to view themselves as entrepreneurs of their own ‘brand’ produces a divided, fragmented consciousness that is unhelpful to genuine creativity, and ultimately to the pursuit of authenticity and wholeness.”

Michelle Lorimer
2025 Protégé

“Disruption re: the effects of AI on the role and work of human artists. To some degree we have always used technology to aid us in our human creation-making, but currently, where it’s now possible for non-human entities to have agency enough to produce a type of “art” — it seems to me crucial to dive deeper into the ethical, humanistic, and spiritual questions surrounding human art making: what is the worth and value of human-created art, above and beyond its commodification value in a mass market?”

Natasha Powell
2023 Winner

“The precarity of the dance field in Toronto has me questioning the future of my work and what form it can take now and in the near future.” 

Roydon Tse
2023 Winner

“What concerns me most as I look at the state of the world are the proposed arts funding cuts, which threaten the support systems artists rely on, and the rapid rise of AI, which is transforming creative work in both exciting and unsettling ways. As an educator, I often think about how the next generation of artists will navigate and cope within this shifting landscape. I pray for discernment in our leadership and hope that the arts will continue to flourish in spite of difficult times of transition.”

Sophie Dupuis
2019 Protégé

“I see artists struggle to make a living and to cope with feeling unvalued, and it’s even more difficult when messages we get from governing bodies’ actions diminish our worth. It’s truly gutting hearing news of a colleague who took their own life, knowing that they were struggling so much but that they had so much more to offer. It’s truly terrifying.”

Suba Sankaran
2023 Winner

“I’ve been thinking about how to balance the complex and evolving relationship of music and technology with the universe of emotion, expression, and nuance one can only experience from live performance. I’m spending a lot of time practicing my music, composing, exercising, spending time in nature, and keeping ‘elbows up’ with what I consume, all as part of this personal research!”

Sunny Drake
2019 Winner

“In a time when most theatres are struggling financially and under the weight of a collapsing world, I’m contemplating what democratic theatre presentations might look like. Theatre in living rooms, backyards, basements, warehouses…”

What's Coming Up

November 2025

December 2025

January 2026

  • Suba Sankaran will perform in Robert Burns: A Passion for Freedom at Hugh’s Room Live on January 23 in Toronto. She will tour the UK with Miranda Mulholland’s Letters to the Future from January 24 to February 8, with performances in Scotland and London.

  • John Kameel Farah’s new work Villages in Exile, commissioned by Arraymusic Ensemble, will premiere in January in Toronto. He will also perform at the Copenhagen Winter Jazz Festival.

February 2026

  • Suba Sankaran will perform in Centuries of Souls II, presented by Confluence Concerts, on February 13 and 14 in Toronto.

  • Sophie Dupuis’s collaboration with Quasar and Monterrey-based artists will will be performed on February 23 in Monterrey, Mexico and on March 11 in Montreal.

  • With several opera projects on the go, James Rolfe’s new ghost opera will premiere in February in Halifax.

March 2026

  • Weyni Mengesha is directing the US tour of Kim’s Convenience, opening at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on March 21, with further stops in Boston, San Diego, and New Jersey.

April 2026

May 2026

  • Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Pictures from an Imagined Exhibition, a 30-minute piano concerto blending East-West musical traditions, will premiere on May 16 in Toronto with pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico and the Kindred Spirits Orchestra, conducted by Kristian Alexander.

  • Suba Sankaran will perform in Queens, Divas and Icons, Oh My!, curated by Teiya Kasahara and presented by Confluence Concerts, on May 22 and 23 in Toronto. With FreePlay, she will tour rural venues across the UK in late May to early June 2026.

  • Michelle Lorimer’s new composition for concert band and choir for the Arts Huron Consortium will be performed by music students of Huron Heights Secondary School in May in Newmarket. She is also composing the original score for a short animated film produced by ACE Canada’s Women in Animation (WIA) program, which brings together women professionals from across the Canadian animation industry — expected to be released in spring 2026.

Later 2026-2027

  • With the team at Créations In Vivo, Dillon Orr is preparing Patenteuses, a feminist neo-rural musical, which will premiere in fall 2026. A 20-minute showcase of the work is also scheduled to be presented at Contact Ontarois 2026. He is also deep in the creation of Marée haute — expected to premiere in 2027. Meanwhile, his show Mourir de trop gueuler continues to evolve: version 1 continues to tour while parts 2 and 3 are in development. Through the lens of bouffon, the piece invites Franco-Ontarians to laugh at themselves (at our myths, symbols, and contradictions) opening a rare space for criticism and mockery we don’t usually allow ourselves.