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Light Up The Night - A 5Rhythms® Benefit Dance with Elisa Hollenberg, Layah Jane, & Rhondda SnaryFri Nov 14, 2025, 7-9:30pm
Neighbourhood Unitarian Universalist Congregation
310 Danforth Avenue, Toronto, ON
$20 - $60+ sliding scale
Warm Bellies, Warm Hands, Warm Hearts
As the nights grow colder, we gather to dance, to kindle warmth, and to strengthen the threads of our community. The care we create together does not end at the floor. It ripples outward, nourishing the communities where we live and move.
This year’s benefit supports the Daily Bread Food Bank and a local hats, scarves, socks and mitts initiative through our Baskets of Warmth. Food banks across Ontario are experiencing record-breaking demand in 2025, driven by rising costs of living, stagnant wages, and a lack of affordable housing. In 2024, visits to Daily Bread’s member food banks reached 3.75 million, a historic high compared to pre-pandemic levels. In January 2025, the City of Toronto officially declared a food insecurity emergency.
As we move through two 5Rhythms Waves of music and light the fire of our community hearth, we reach into our generous hearts to extend care beyond ourselves. Right here, we can make a difference, offering food for warm bellies, clothing for warm hands, and love that warms the heart.
Our neighbours and our global community need us so much right now, and we need each other. We are living in a polycrisis, pulled in many directions, and this night is a way of resourcing ourselves and nourishing our local community so that our attention, and our love can be turned generously in ways that ripple far beyond the dance floor.
All are welcome here: all bodies, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, abilities and movement experience. NUUC is a wheelchair-accessible venue.
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Important Ticket & Registration Info
Choose the tier that feels right for you. If you have the means, we encourage you to give generously. Your ticket not only brings you to the dance floor, but it also provides meals to households in our community for a day, a week, a month, or more, truly making a difference for those struggling with food insecurity.
If you’re not able to be with us on the night of, you can still choose to donate using the donation section below our ticket tier options.
Ticket Tiers
Spark – $20 + HST (entry fee + 6 meals donated)
Flame – $24 + HST (entry fee + 10 meals donated)
Torch – $32 + HST (entry fee + 18 meals donated)
Hearth – $44 + HST ( entry fee + 30 meals donated)
Bonfire – $60 + HST (entry fee + 46 meals donated)
100% of net proceeds will be donated to our beneficiary.
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Meet Your Hosts
Elisa Hollenberg – Elisa is passionate about bringing 5Rhythms® to people who crave and want more movement and self-expression in their everyday lives. She has been dancing since the age of 5, dipping her toes into as many movement practices as she could find (ballet, jazz, modern, contemporary, hula hoop, yoga, ecstatic dance) and the 5Rhythms® practice since 2002. She has facilitated 5Rhythms® since 2018, works as a community mental health researcher, is the founder of Create-Move-Connect, performer and facilitator with Truly Connecting Playback Theatre. “I live and work in a big city context where I try to connect hearts to hearts and bring embodied presence into daily life.” https://www.5rhythms.com/teachers/Elisa+Hollenberg
Layah Jane Singer-Wilson – Layah first fell for 5Rhythms® in her late teens and for the last 20+ years has steeped herself in movement meditation practice. Passionate about offering people sacred space to experience motion as medicine, Layah has facilitated expressive movement since 2003 for all ages in a wide range of settings. Her work is infused with expressive enthusiasm, ritual, improvisation, and a reverent love of creative practice as a transformational act. Layah is a certified 5Rhythms® teacher accredited with the 5Rhythms® Teachers’ Association. www.layahjane.com
Rhondda Snary – Life moves. For Rhondda, this is the essence. As a Certified and Accredited 5Rhythms® teacher, and Certified in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, Rhondda creates space for our full life experience to show up and be danced, as is, expressed through movement, trusting our body’s wisdom. Her trauma-informed teaching guides us into grounded somatic embodiment, with deep compassion, care, and full-hearted, lyrical spirit. Founder of Light Up the Night, Rhondda initiated this benefit in 2015 to bring community together in support of others, and gratefully bows to all the dancers and teachers who help keep this light alive, ten years on! https://www.5rhythms.com/teachers/Rhondda+Snary
Alejandro Zuluaga – Alejandro is a community organizer, social arts facilitator, yoga teacher, and holistic practitioner with over 15 years of experience in mental health and addiction recovery. He creates inclusive, meaningful spaces for people to reconnect with their bodies and each other through somatics, embodied movement, mindfulness, and nature-based practices. His own path is nourished by yoga, Vipassana meditation, intuitive music-making, and the dance floor. In service to movement, connection, and community, Alejandro is preparing to enter the 5Rhythms® Teacher Training stream with the intention of weaving this practice into his life’s work of healing and collective care. https://alejandroczuluaga.com
Simona Irwin – Simona is a mindfulness teacher, neuroplasticity coach, somatic practitioner, and mother of two. She is the creator of the Befriending Fear series and has spent more than two decades supporting people living with trauma, chronic illness, and nervous system challenges. Rooted in deep ecology, systemic constellations, and mindfulness practice, her work weaves movement, inquiry, and reverence for the lineages and stories carried in the body. Devoted to the mystery, the little and big dance, Simona is preparing to enter the 5Rhythms® Teacher Training stream in 2026 to bring her love of this practice into the heart of her work. https://turningtowards.me
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Neighbourhood Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 20 Jackman Ave, Toronto, ON M4K, Canada
Tickets
