Seattle’s fall dance season kicks off with homegrown talent alongside visiting choreographers bringing new energy to local stages. The lineup ranges from experimental world premieres and site-specific works to a major repertory highlight. At a time when arts funding is under strain, showing up for dance is one of the most vital ways to keep the city’s cultural scene thriving.

Fall ’25

Whim W’him’s annual fall Choreographic Shindig opens the company’s season and gives its dancers a chance to choose who they work with for the program. Selected from a competitive pool of international applicants, the three artists create pieces for the Whim W’Him dancers, working closely with them on a unique rep. This year, the company marks the 10th anniversary of the Choreographic Shindig, bringing in three female creatives—Chloe Crenshaw, Genna Moroni, and Lea Ved—with singular voices and distinctive points of view. According to Whim W’Him founder and artistic director Olivier Wevers, Moroni’s work, Livin’ the Dream, “is deeply investigating dreams and their meaning,” and Ved’s yet-to-be-titled piece is at “the forefront of European innovation, moving groups and individuals in ways that are dynamic and really touching, in a very human vulnerability.”

Fall ’25 runs September 12–20 at Erickson Theater.

Fuselage Dance Film Festival

Now in its eighth year, the Fuselage Dance Film Festival blossomed out of a friendship between two Pacific Northwesterners: dancer, choreographer, and founder of Yaw Theater, Stella Kutz, and filmmaker Will Lemke, founder of Propagate Films. Friends since high school, the duo launched Fuselage as a platform for regional film-makers and dancers to show their work alongside the top picks on the global dance film festival circuit. “This year’s season has brought volumes of film submissions from around the world, ensuring another opportunity for us to distill our selections down to another exciting and intriguing program,” says Kutz. “Expect dance styles of every kind, with films of every genre and format.”

Fuselage Dance Film Festival will happen September 13 at Yaw Theater.

OCCURENCE #14

A series of much-anticipated presentations from Spectrum Dance Theater, Donald Byrd’s “Occurrences” are modeled after the late choreographer Merce Cunningham’s performance pieces, called “Events,” that featured a rearrangement of choreography shown in unconventional places (museums, gyms, public spaces).

Much like Cunningham, Byrd has fun with the movement in these shows, embracing a sense of play as he cuts, splices, and edits the movements of existing works, creating juxtapositions, harmonies, and new combinations meant to delight, surprise, and make the audience think. “It’s when I get to nerd out as a choreographer,” he says. “I recombine past work with new material, guided by imagination and the pursuit of the next right thing to do.”

OCCURENCE #14, October 1–5 at the Tricia Stromberg Studio Theater at Spectrum Dance Theater.

Out There

Velocity Dance Center, Seattle’s hub for contemporary movement, is launching a new festival this October. Titled OUT THERE, the two-weekend program is dedicated to experimental dance from choreographers along the West Coast. Each weekend will feature two artists (including Seattle based Maia Melene Durfé, Jordan MacIntosh-Hougham, and Jesse Freitas) sharing two 30-minute pieces, preceded and followed by DJ sets to capture the mood.

OUT THERE, October 2–4 and 9–11 at 12th Ave. Arts.

What is War

Legendary movement artist Eiko Otake (half of modern dance duo Eiko & Koma) joins forces with choreographer and dancer Wen Hui in What is War, a bodily exploration of their memories of political and social conflict. Presented at On the Boards, the show, which features movement and video, is “resonant with the global context we are in right now of conflict,” says longtime fan and On the Boards executive director, Megan Kiskaddon. “This dance work pulls from Eiko’s experience in post-war Japan and Wen Hui’s upbringing during the Cultural Revolution in China, and it is utterly beautiful, intimate, and impactful. The two of them bring a mastery of how to tell big stories on a human scale with their literal bodies.”

What is War, October 9–11 at On the Boards.

Sea Change Within Us

In partnership with the Seattle Art Museum, Karin Stevens Dance presents Sea Change Within Us, a re-creation of a 2019 work. Inspired by the increasingly negative impacts of global warming, choreographer Karin Stevens explains that the sixty-minute piece addresses “local Washington state water concerns and climate change consequences through the voices of real people we interviewed, combined with moving rigid structures of water images by dancing human bodies.”

Set in the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, the work is deeply collaborative, bringing together original sound compositions by Kaley Lane Eaton and Jessi Harvey, and a large-scale architectural installation by Roger Feldman. For the 2025 iteration, the company commissioned former Seattle Civic Poet Jourdan Imani Keith to contribute an original verse, which is now integrated into the expanded sound score. “My goal has been to make the piece more direct and accessible,” says Stevens, “so that any viewer, whether an art patron or not, can clearly understand what the work addresses and why it matters. To support this, I conducted six new interviews and worked with the composer to integrate these voices into sections that were previously without spoken text in the 2019 version.”

Sea Change Within Us debuts on October 19 at the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion.

Arrivals

Inspired by the historic King Street Station, Arrivals is the new work from contemporary dance collective, the Seattle Project. Described by founding artistic director Amanda Morgan, as “a movement residency series,” the one-time performance looks at the history and activity of the train station, delving into the many reasons that people pass through, including paying “homage to the immigrants who first arrived in Seattle at King Street Station, those who were forcibly removed during Japanese internment, and the many immigrants who continue to make our city what it is.” Accompanying films will be shown in the gallery and remain on view through November.

Arrivals debuts on October 25 at ARTS at King Street Station.

In the Upper Room

For the second repertory of its current season, Pacific Northwest Ballet brings back a Twyla Tharp favorite, the ultra-athletic In the Upper Room, featuring 13 dancers performing to music by Philip Glass, their costumes evolving across a spectrum of shades as the piece runs.

Also on the bill are Dani Rowe’s The Window (debuted at PNB in 2023), a poignant one-act ballet about life’s most important moments, and a world premiere from company members Amanda Morgan and Christopher D’Ariano.

In the Upper Room runs November 7–16 at McCaw Hall.

This story is part of Seattle magazine’s Autumn Arts series, which highlights theater, dance, and visual arts across the city.