2026 Breaking Ground Contemporary Dance Festival is Coming To TCA

The Breaking Ground Contemporary Dance Festival will return to the Tempe Center for the Arts for its 2026 season, celebrating 19 years of bold, boundary-pushing contemporary dance.

New this year, each evening begins with a free Community Movement Class in the TCA Lobby (6:45–7:15 PM), open to dancers and non-dancers alike, and introduces guest hosts—with The Ladies hosting Friday and Lolita Hernandez hosting Saturday. The 2026 festival also highlights International Artists from Canada, Italy, and South Korea.

The festival takes place January 30–31 at 7:30 PM at the Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, with post-show Q&A sessions each night. 

This year's standout performances include:

Valkyrie Yao is a China-born multidisciplinary artist and scholar currently based in Arizona following the completion of her MFA at Arizona State University. Profile XX is an intergenerational feminist dance theatre work examining how womanhood is shaped by social surveillance, inherited memory, and psychological fragmentation.

Cristina Camacho (aka Macho) is a Los Angeles– and New York–based choreographer and performer whose work bridges contemporary and street styles, with credits spanning MTV, BET, The CW, and leading concert dance venues. Who's Afraid of Forever? is a contemporary dance quartet reimagining Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? through time and memory, reframing two couples as a single relationship split between younger and older selves.

Fabio Liberti is an Italian choreographer based in Denmark whose work has been presented internationally across Europe and North America, with commissions for companies including Danish Dance Theatre, Skånes Dansteater, and Norrdans. Don't, Kiss. Louisiana is a physically demanding duet examining addiction and relational co-dependency through sustained physical contact, with performers remaining lip-locked throughout the piece.