CELEBRATING 15 YEARS OF THE DANCE + PERFORMANCE INSTITUTE! JOIN US. LET'S DANCE!

All Are Invited! New Waves! Institute presents its FINAL SEASON from 30 July - 1 August 2025 in Trinidad & Tobago! This special 3-day gathering will bring together an exceptional community of dance and performance artists, scholars and teachers to be announced over the next several weeks. Registration is now open and closes on Monday, 31 March 2025.
New Waves! 2025 will be the most celebratory ever! We are celebrating 12 iterations of the New Waves! Institute, hosted in its home base of Trinidad and Tobago, and in Haiti, New York and Barbados. Over 1,000 dance artists, scholars, teachers, administrators, those in dance production (lighting and costume designers, musicians), and other leaders in the field of dance from around the world have participated since the program's inception in 2011. Each year, we gather to galvanize, play, workshop, commune, disrupt, engage, celebrate, mourn, heal, and move. Our vision is to embody the depth and spirit of contemporary dance and performance practice in the Caribbean and its Diasporas and connect in essential ways that alters and brings out light in one another.
Program highlights for New Waves! 2025 include: an Opening Celebration in collaboration with Guest Artists; a two-day series of workshops, lectures, film screenings, and movement sessions; and a special Emancipation Day presentation. Join us for this "las' lap" of New Waves! Institute, a program of the Dance + Performance Institute.
"This revolution of Emancipation, the revolution of Independence...that did not happen, it is still to happen." - Tony Hall, New Waves! Founding Faculty
NEWS/PRESS

"I can articulate these connections now, but it would not be until I visited Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to attend the New Waves! Dance and Performance Institute in 2018 that I would witness God’s queerness so fluidly across sites of religious ecstasy and hedonistic abandon. It was during that trip that I realized I could take queerness and my God (in all their forms) with me, wherever I go, without shame or consequence. I’d come to the institute in 2018 intending to observe — a collaborator of mine, a choreographer, was there participating in daily movement workshops - "... but my plans to be a passive gawker were immediately thwarted: I was told that observation without participation was not permitted, and deeply “colonial.” The New Waves! founder, Makeda Thomas, has been facilitating the Institute for several years and the space — exclusively dedicated to African and Caribbean futurisms, ancestral spirituality, embodied practices, and most importantly, Black liberation — required collective fellowship in corporeal movement as a central part of its practice and operation."