SummerWorks Performance Festival 2026
FIGHT | FLIGHT
Our 2026 edition features 27 live performances, including three world premieres, six works-in-development, five site-engaged performances, along with seven workshops and panel discussions. This year marks a significant moment in SummerWorks’ history, as 1/3 of the overall curated programming features international artists and creative collaborators from ten (10) countries and regions (Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iran, Mexico, New Zealand, and Taiwan), making this one of our most internationally-diverse summer Festivals to date.
This year’s Festival theme, Fight | Flight brings forward urgent creative responses to this troubling moment in time. Across the 2026 Festival, artists root themselves in place, community, ancestry, and practice, while also shifting perspectives, rewriting histories, and creating new narratives through the body, exploring memory, consent, transformation, and identity, through resistance, humour, and intimacy.
Check out which shows are happening at The Theatre Centre!
by Boaz Barkam
Theatre | BMO Incubator
Tue Aug 11, 8:00 PM
Wed Aug 12, 9:30 PM
Thu Aug 13, 7:30 PM
With brutal honesty and dark humour, Our Other Organ digs into the living human body to uncover a hidden organ: the place where racism resides. Performer Boaz Barkan leads a gripping performance lecture that fuses physical theatre, anatomy, and history into a visceral, intimate encounter to dissect contemporary Jewish identity.
by Nate Yaffe
Dance / Theatre | Franco Boni Theatre
WED AUG 12, 8:00 PM
THU AUG 13, 9:00 PM
SAT AUG 15, 1:00 PM
In this messy, boisterous work, Nate Yaffe reminds us that we are not only consumers but also consumable. Rot Hat is a speculative ceremony to find the ecstatic release of dying and decomposing back into the earth. With Ben Grossman on the hurdy-gurdy, they recall medieval dances and long lost songs of joy and grief surrounded by logs and rotting fruit.
by Quote Unquote Collective & El Ingenio del Caldero
Theatre | BMO Incubator
THU AUG 13, 4:00 PM
FRI AUG 14, 7:30 PM
An American, a Mexican, and a Canadian walk into a customs detention cell… Little White Room is a new play-in-development – a three-woman, multilingual, multinational satire that forces you to laugh while it kicks you in the groin and pulls a bag over your head.
by Sara Porter Productions
Theatre | Franco Boni Theatre
Thu Aug 13, 6:00 PM
Fri Aug 14, 9:00 PM
Sat Aug 15, 9:00 PM
Hello Sunshine! is the third of Sara Porter’s Memoir & Movement solos that integrate comedy, dance, improvisation, poetry, and visual design. It’s playful, witty and wrestles with the absurdity, grief and confusion of living with a UV radiation (sunlight) allergy. Sara seeks a path toward a ‘lightness of being’ in a life full of dark days.
by Xin Ji
Dance | Franco Boni Theatre
FRI AUG 14, 6:00 PM
SAT AUG 15, 1:00 PM
In this dynamic solo work by dance artist Xin Ji, the story of his body unravels through moments where the emotional and physical collide. Uncertainty, recklessness and euphoria slide into an intimate personal narrative — offering ways to consider our bodies as vehicles for resistance and alchemy.
by Maryam Khalili
Theatre / Lecture | Franco Boni Theatre
Sun Aug 16, 1:00 PM
On the date of this performance, all the artists will be absent. Only for a voice which through interviews, prison letters, and archival materials leads you through theater practices inside Iranian prisons from 1954 to 2024. This lecture-performance discusses censorship, collective resistance and how imprisoned artists rehearsed, and staged performances under conditions of isolation and repression, all through the body of voice and memory.
by Keely O’Brien
Theatre / Live Art / Participatory | BMO Incubator
SAT AUG 15, 7:00 PM
SUN AUG 16, 3:00 PM
Secret Ingredients satisfies a human itch to peek into intimate and relatable details of other people’s lives and of our own. Public submitted messages too difficult to say directly are translated onto cakes, delivered to their recipients and served to the audience. You’ll eat cake and experience a sensory journey of sweetness, tension, and vulnerability of human connection.
About SummerWorks
Since 2014, thanks to our forever home, we have been one of SummerWorks’ primary venues welcoming amazing works that expand the possibilities of performance. But our history goes even further back! When we were working from the basement of The Great Hall, we were a venue for SummerWorks shows!
Our former Artistic Director, Franco Boni, was also the director of SummerWorks Performance Festival 20 years ago (2000-2004), bringing his unique curatorial vision to the festival.
In 2024, we celebrated 10 years of being in our forever home by co-presenting two works with SummerWorks.
Now led by Michael Caldwell and Morgan Norwich, the 35th anniversary festival dives into our memories, our legacies, our bodies, and our relationship to time.
Learn more at summerworks.ca
For the most accurate and up-to-date festival information, and to purchase tickets, please visit summerworks.ca!
The Theatre Centre
May 11, 2026
Tiny Concert Series for Torontonians is a new initiative at The Theatre Centre, presenting free and low-cost music events over the next several months! This performance is part of events that we’re calling our Tiny Concert Series for Torontonians, increasing the community’s access to shared arts and culture experiences. The music programming will span a range...
April 16, 2026
“Some of my all-time favourite moments have been when something hilariously awkward happens in public and I catch the eyes of a stranger and for a second we know exactly what each other is thinking. And then we go about our lives. It’s a beautiful intimacy.” For actor, director, and writer Gregory Prest, even a...
April 10, 2026
“And so with this understanding that we are under constant surveillance, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously, we start adapting our behavior to it.” Nehal El-Hadi wants you to know that you’re being watched. With her journalistic and academic background, Nehal’s research has focused on data collection and space-making. Through the Residency program with...