The Year I Stopped Disappearing

PRIDE 2026

EILERS Dance Theatre was born from both love and necessity.

For over a decade, I poured enormous energy into independent creation, community-building, producing, mentoring, teaching, touring, and sustaining work often without the structural support needed to do it sustainably. I remain deeply grateful for those years and all they taught me as an artist, collaborator, and human being.

But eventually I realized I could no longer build my life inside systems that required constant self-sacrifice to survive.

At the same time, I was becoming more honest with myself about my queerness, my gender, my body, and the kinds of spaces I longed existed when I was younger.

EILERS Dance Theatre emerged from those converging realizations.

I wanted to create an organization where rigorous contemporary performance could exist alongside embodiment, mentorship, queer and trans-centred creation, youth programming, and genuine community connection.

Not as side projects.
As the foundation.

This year marks my fifth Pride consciously proud of who I am.

For much of my life, I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me. As a child, I became hyper-aware of trying to follow the “rules” around me, watching closely, adapting constantly, afraid that being fully myself would lead to rejection or abandonment.

Then slowly, something began changing.

Through art.
Through community.
Through listening.
Through queer and trans people speaking honestly about their lives and experiences.

In 2020, during a program called Sharing Privilege in Hamilton, I listened to someone describe their experience of being queer. I remember physically shaking because something inside me immediately recognized itself.

I spent a whole day alone simply saying:

“Dear body, I hear you. Your truth is welcome here.”

Eventually another truth emerged:

I was not a woman.

At first, I was terrified. I knew accepting myself might mean losing comfort, familiarity, and approval. But I also realized something equally important:

If someone cannot accept who you truly are, they are not asking you to belong, they are asking you to disappear.

That realization transformed my life.

Today, EILERS Dance Theatre exists to help create spaces I once desperately needed:
spaces where queer and trans people can move, create, gather, imagine, and exist more fully.

This Pride season, we are raising support for the next chapter of this work through EILERS Dance Theatre. We are grateful to be supported through Chimera Dance Theatre’s FRESH FUND initiative, which provides mentorship and structural support during this important stage of growth.

 You can donate HERE. 

Your support directly helps sustain:

Fancy Cat
A joyful dance-theatre musical celebrating gender-diverse children through movement, music, and storytelling which will be touring across Ontario and Nova Scotia. 

Queer Conscious Moving Bodies
Sliding-scale movement workshops grounded in embodiment, presence, and queer/trans experience. Join us on Sunday, June 21, 2026 at The Fifth Dance 3:30 PM  4:45 PM -  more info and how to register linked HERE

TRANScendARTS
Creative movement spaces for trans and gender-expansive children ages 5–12. Happening every Tuesday in June at 5:00-6:00pm. Information linked HERE

Boy Q: Negotiations in Flesh and Rubber
A bold new dance-theatre work exploring gender, power, awkwardness, and desire, premiering in Austria in September/October 2026.

Dangerous Vacancies
A new ensemble dance-theatre work exploring grief, transformation, memory, and collective survival through ritual, movement, and live performance. The work continues development toward major presentations on April 9th 2027 at Oakville Center for the Performing Arts and at The Citadel June 2-5, 2-27 in Toronto.

If you believe art can help people feel less alone…
If you believe young people deserve spaces where they can imagine themselves fully…
If you believe queer and trans stories matter…

We invite you to support this work. Donate HERE. 

This is just the beginning.

With gratitude and Pride,

Sid Ryan