Imaginary Expedition

Advance access to new music + shows:

facilitator bios | presentation workshops | participatory workshops | rates

Imaginary Expedition is a Toronto-based folk duo made up of Victoria Dobbs and Glyph Greenleaf, two multidisciplinary artists with backgrounds in music performance, education, improvisation, circus arts, and other creative practices. Alongside our concerts, we offer workshops that draw on the skills and experience we bring to our work both on and off stage. Workshops are available for festivals, schools, libraries, community centres, camps, and other community spaces, and can be adapted for different ages, group sizes, and settings.

We offer two workshop formats

Presentation workshops are demonstration-style sessions combining explanation, stories, questions, light participation, and performances, leaving attendees with a greater understanding or appreciation of a subject or craft.

Participatory workshops are fully-interactive, hands-on sessions in which attendees learn, try, sing, play, or practise alongside Victoria or Glyph while developing a new skill of their own to take home.

Meet the facilitators

Photo by Victoria Dobbs.

Glyph Greenleaf

Glyph Greenleaf (he/they) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, educator, and juggler whose practice spans music performance, composition, teaching, and movement arts.

Music education + teaching experience

Bachelor of Music, New England Conservatory, Contemporary Improvisation
Minor in Music Theory
Teaching experience in piano, guitar, mandolin, recorder, music theory, composition, and ear training
Teaching Assistant in solfège at New England Conservatory in Boston, MA

More about Glyph

Performance + improvisation

Glyph’s performance background includes classical piano, improvised music, recorder, historical performance, and contemporary folk. He spent a year accompanying a fully improvised musical theatre ensemble, creating music spontaneously in response to performers and audience suggestions. He has also performed recorder and harpsichord with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, appeared as a featured player with the Boston Recorder Orchestra, and composed original works for recorder. Glyph’s playing in Imaginary Expedition centres on a self-developed lap-style classical guitar technique with five-finger fretting.

Juggling

After more than 18 years of juggling, Glyph is an experienced club juggler, performer, and instructor whose work treats juggling as both a technical skill and an artistic medium. He has performed and taught workshops at Québec City’s Turbo juggling festival and Montréal's Jam Jam Fest in 2026, the Guelph Juggling Festival in 2025, and incorporated juggling into his thesis performance at New England Conservatory. He has also competed and taken home prizes at countless juggling festivals and teaches both beginners and experienced jugglers through classes, workshops, coaching, and community juggling meetups.

A few more things about Glyph

Glyph’s interests tend to spill well beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. He has competed in mathematics contests, composed chess puzzles for students, invented a phonetic neographic writing system for English, developed his own system of musical notation, and is currently working on a notation system for juggling.

He also works as a piano tuner and technician for private clients, with additional professional experience tuning harpsichords and fortepianos. His audio work includes recording, mixing, mastering, and live sound engineering, including sound for large events. For Boston Baroque, he has worked behind the scenes as an orchestral score reader, following the music in real time and cueing a livestream director toward the musicians carrying the musical action.

Outside all of that, Glyph is deeply drawn to the natural world, especially trees, which regularly find their way into the places he spends time, the music he makes, and the way he notices the world around him.

Across these pursuits runs the same curiosity about patterns, systems, precision, and how complicated things work.

Photo by Glyph Greenleaf.

Victoria Dobbs

Victoria Dobbs (she/her) is a vocalist, songwriter, ukulele player, educator, community builder, and event producer with a background spanning live performance, children’s music education, visual communication, and grassroots arts organizing.

Music education + teaching experience

Music Together® teacher training, and teaching in San Francisco, CA and Toronto, ON
Designed and taught a two-week children’s beginner ukulele summer program at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, ON
Private ukulele teaching experience
One year as a vocal director with a community youth musical theatre, working with performers ages 6–24

More about Victoria

Performance + events

Victoria has performed professionally as a vocalist for more than a decade across folk, pop, rock, choral, theatrical, and tribute projects, in settings ranging from intimate acoustic performances to large stages at theatres and festivals.

Before forming Imaginary Expedition, much of Victoria’s musical life centred on learning, interpreting, and performing other people’s songs. Imaginary Expedition marked a shift toward original songwriting.

Her work has also extended behind the scenes. She has produced immersive theatre and a wide range of grassroots arts and community events, with experience in event production, audience-building, promotion, and creating welcoming and participatory spaces.

Community + creative practice

Victoria has a background in graphic design and brings that practice into Imaginary Expedition through the duo’s visual identity, artwork, websites, promotional materials, and other creative projects. She has also worked as a professional organizer and has spent years creating and leading intentional communities built around co-living, shared resources, and collaborative creative life.

Grassroots organizing and promotion have been part of Victoria’s life since she was young, and much of her work has centred on bringing people together around music, art, shared spaces, and experiences.

Presentation workshops

Lap-Style Classical Guitar: What changes when you turn the guitar sideways?

by Glyph Greenleaf

Glyph demonstrates the unusual lap-style classical guitar technique he developed for use in Imaginary Expedition. By turning the guitar horizontally and reversing the orientation of the fretting hand, he can use the thumb as an additional fretting finger and approach chords and independent melodic lines in completely different ways than with conventional guitar technique. This workshop explores how and why the technique developed, what it makes possible, and how it shapes the arrangements audiences hear in Imaginary Expedition’s music.

Running time:
30-60 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, with content and pacing geared primarily toward adults.

Piano Improvisation: spontaneous composition from silence to structure

by Glyph Greenleaf

How do you make up a piece of music while you are already playing it? Glyph demonstrates improvisation at the piano, creating music in real time while explaining some of the choices that shape what happens next. Through examples and audience suggestions, the workshop explores melody, harmony, rhythm, form, musical style, listening, and the relationship between instinct and learned musical vocabulary. Each session develops differently because the music itself is created in the room.

Running time:
30-90 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, with content and pacing geared primarily toward adults.

Requirements:
Acoustic piano. Digital piano may be provided upon request.

Recorder: Exploring the history, technique, and surprising range of a familiar instrument

by Glyph Greenleaf

The recorder is familiar to many people as a first school instrument, but its musical possibilities extend far beyond the elementary classroom. Glyph demonstrates the expressive and technical range of the recorder while exploring its history as a professional instrument, its place in historical european music, and its continuing possibilities in contemporary and folk music. The session combines performance, explanation, and a closer look at an instrument whose simplest form is familiar to millions but whose full capabilities are much less widely explored.

Running time:
30-60 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, with content and pacing geared primarily toward adults.

Juggling: An awe-inspiring analysis of patterns, precision, artistry, and advanced technique

by Glyph Greenleaf

Glyph offers a close-up look at juggling as both a technical skill and a creative practice. Through live demonstrations, he breaks down how increasingly complex juggling patterns are built, how timing and coordination work, and how jugglers develop new skills through progression and repetition. The workshop can also explore juggling as an artistic and compositional medium, including the relationships between pattern, rhythm, movement, and music. The result is part explanation, part spectacle. Audiences get insight into advanced juggling that shows how far the form can be pushed after more than 18 years of practice.

Running time:
30-45 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, with content and pacing geared primarily toward adults.

Requirements:
High ceiling. Outdoor only in low wind.

Participatory workshops

Beginner Ukulele: Play your first songs together

by Victoria Dobbs + Glyph Greenleaf

Victoria and Glyph introduce the ukulele through simple chords, rhythm, strumming, and playing together as a group. Designed for complete beginners, the workshop gets participants making recognizable music quickly while building a foundation they can continue exploring on their own. No previous musical experience is required.

Running time:
45-120 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, can be tailored toward adults or children.

Requirements:
Ukuleles for attendees.

Beginner Juggling: Learn the basics of three-object juggling

by Glyph Greenleaf

Glyph breaks juggling down into approachable steps, helping participants build the timing, coordination, and movement patterns needed for a three-object cascade. The workshop is designed for complete beginners, with individual troubleshooting and challenges available for participants who progress quickly. Glyph’s teaching focuses on giving people practical tools they can continue using after the workshop, rather than simply trying to keep three objects in the air before the hour is over.

The juggling workshop can also be offered as a drop-in station, with Glyph demonstrating and teaching individuals or small groups as people wander by. It works especially well for festivals, fairs, and other events with a steady flow of visitors.

Running time:
45-120 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for all ages, can be tailored toward adults or children.

Requirements:
High ceiling. Outdoor only in low wind.

Toddler Song Circle: Music-making for young children and their grown-ups

by Victoria Dobbs + Glyph Greenleaf

A playful participatory session for children 5 and under and the parents or caregivers who accompany them. Victoria + Glyph lead the group through singing, movement, rhythm, repetition, and musical play, with grown-ups participating alongside their children rather than watching from the sidelines. The emphasis is on shared singing and movement in a relaxed environment where toddlers are free to respond, join in, wander, dance, or simply observe, helping build familiarity with the basic building blocks of music.

Running time:
20-45 minutes (flexible)

Audience:
Suitable for children under age 5 and their caregivers.

Requirements:
Toddler-friendly space.

Workshop rates

Workshop fees typically range from $150–$750 CAD per hour. Pricing depends on the program, audience size, number of facilitators, type of presenting organization or event, travel, equipment or material needs, and whether the workshop is booked alongside an Imaginary Expedition performance or other routed engagement.

Community, school, library, and nonprofit programs are generally priced toward the lower end of the range, while large public events, private bookings, and corporate programs are priced higher.

Workshop length and format are flexible, and sessions can be adapted to festival schedules, school periods, community programming, drop-in formats, or other existing structures.