Backstage

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Backstage

Now You Know brings you real Toronto experiences from some of our most influential and impactful voices, reflecting the breadth and diversity of Toronto’s creative and cultural industries.

At Lula Lounge, you can learn to salsa one night and get lost in the sounds of Arabic jazz fusion the next. For 21 years, the venue has been creating space for global communities to share their cultures with local audiences.

For Oji-Cree singer-songwriter Aysanabee, it’s a reclamation of his identity that plays a powerful, and empowering, role in the music he’s making against a backdrop of the resurgence of Indigenous cultures and languages.

For 36 years, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery has been immersing visitors in transformative visual works that offer dynamic perspectives and spark thought-provoking conversations.

During the pandemic, composer and producer akaMatisse’s LowKey Concert series offered music to the masses in Toronto’s outdoor spaces. Today, he continues to spread wellness through sound.

With the Awakenings platform, Umbereen Inayet is leading a cultural revolution. The initiative celebrates and amplifies Black, Indigenous, artists of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ creatives.

Fifteen Dogs, a Crow’s Theatre production, is much more than a canine adventure set in Toronto. It asks the profound question: If dogs were given humanity’s intelligence, would they be happier than us?

Mark Williams wants to bring the city’s communities to the symphony — and vice versa. To do so, the CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is fostering genuine relationships, opening the doors to Roy Thomson Hall, and revitalizing programming by balancing local and historical.

Conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser has made a career out of pushing orchestral music’s boundaries. As the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s principal education conductor and community ambassador, he’s envisioning shows where the violin and trumpet share a stage with the Indian tabla or with the sounds of reggae — and where everyone is welcome.

Since its 2003 full production debut, Trey Anthony’s trailblazing and award-winning ‘da Kink In My Hair has broken box-office sales records in Canada, the United States, and England. When it returned to Toronto in 2022 with a brand-new production, the play brought back familiar faces.

For ceramist Sami Tsang art is an outlet to process internal questions and traumas created by an oscillation between the two cultures in which she grew up.

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