Dingolay Community Workshop: The Technique of Ronald Taylor Dance

Join our Artist-in-Residence Ronald Taylor for a community dance workshop!

Dingolay, from Trinidadian parlance meaning “to dance with joyful abandon,” is the signature technique of Ronald Taylor Dance, which fuses Caribbean folk, Modern and Ballet. Rooted in Caribbean rhythms and rituals, it blends Africanist aesthetics—grounded movement, polycentric awareness, improvisation, and call-and-response—with the rigour of classical and modern training.

The movement vocabulary emphasizes groundedness, fluidity, polyrhythm, improvisation, and circular phrasing, reflecting both ancestral traditions and contemporary innovation. As a training practice, Dingolay develops musicality, alignment, and expressive freedom, teaching dancers to embody discipline and abandon while honouring cultural memory.

This class will be followed by a dress rehearsal of Taylor’s forthcoming production, “MASS (A Spiritual Journey to the Creator Within.)”

Ronald Taylor

Ronald A. Taylor is the Artistic Director of the Toronto-based company Ronald Taylor Dance founded in 1993. 

After leaving Trinidad/Tobago in 1986, home to the renowned Astor Johnson Repertory Dance Theatre and Taylor’s mentor/teacher, Ronald moved swiftly to pursue his dream and enrolled in the Juilliard School Dance division in New York. His stay with Dance Theatre of Harlem afforded him two prestigious awards, the DTH Scholarship Award and the Maxwell and Muriel Bluck Scholarship Award. Taylor’s move to Canada in the early ’90’s and eventual MA from York University, catapulted him to a “leading force in dance”.  

Over the course of many years, Ronald Taylor Dance has premiered many thought-provoking productions. Remaining true to his Caribbean roots, his cutting-edge work fuses Caribbean Folk, Modern and traditional Ballet, in a distinctive style which Taylor best describes as “Contemporary Caribbean” Ronald is presently on the teaching staff at York University.