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!
The Sankofa Trilogy: blood.claat, benu, & word! sound! powah! by Watah Theatre
Aug 13-17, 2025
Workshopping a new rendition of the Sankofa Trilogy with an expanded cast, it journeys through extraordinary stories of three generations of powerful Jamaican womxn – Mudgu Sankofa, her daughter Sekesu, and her granddaughter Benu – and their resolute belief in blood, truth, and r/evolution.
Jason by Celia Green
August 13-16, 2025
Using the body, a custom (and fucked up) men’s suit, and a series of objects, this solo performance work tackles themes of transformation, shame, and embodiment from a transmasculine experience.
Leftover Market 剩女經濟 by Su PinWen
August 14-16, 2025
An interdisciplinary solo performance inspired by the term, “剩女 Shèng Nǚ”, meaning “Leftover Women”, with Taiwanese Mandarin and English pop music.
Xilopango by Irma Villafuerte
August 15-17, 2025
A contemporary dance-theatre work by Salvadorian-Canadian choreographer Irma Villafuerte. It explores intergenerational memory, migration, and matrilineal resilience through a Central American dance lens, tracing four generations of women impacted by war, colonization, and exile.
BLEU NÉON by Kim-Sanh Châu / MIDLAND
August 12-14, 2025
A solo entirely performed from the squat position, a typically Asian posture. In a distant, fictional Vietnam, Châu moves through fantasized nostalgia, lost language, and sexual objectification—echoes shared across Asian diasporic experience.
CAKE by Wayne Burns
August 14, 2025
CAKE transforms the body into a battleground, where exertion and consumption collide in a grotesque, almost absurd ritual. Oscillating between collapse and euphoria, it skewers beauty dogma and desirability economies. Through a bizarre test of endurance, the piece dismantles normative ideals, exposing the violent, yet strangely comical, architectures of self-fashioning, queerness, and transformation.
This Didn’t Start with Me or You: Why should you give a shit about experimental artists making performance in the 1980’s?
August 14, 2025
In the 80s, theatre and dance artists in Toronto were making work that didn’t wait for permission. Let’s bring together a group of artists who were there (and are still here!). Who were they? What were they responding to? And how did SummerWorks, founded in 1991, grow out of that energy and become a home for it?
Elder Duke Redbird
August 16, 2025
A live recording of an episode for Elder Duke’s podcast, discussing the overall Festival theme – Back to the Future | Forward to the Past – with an exciting lineup of special guests, including SummerWorks’ Artistic Director, Michael Caldwell.
Je ne vais pas inonder la mer
by Sonia Bustos | Co-presented by DanceWorks
August 15-17, 2025
Je ne vais pas inonder la mer is a danced elegy, an exercise in evocation through movement, that seeks to share emotional experience through an amplified presence of the five senses.
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
November 25, 2025
From Artistic Director Aislinn Rose “We, and the artists and community who have found a home at 1115 Queen Street West, shall be forever grateful. Thank you Lindy.” Lindy Cowan and Chris Hatley being celebrated at the naming event for The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre in 2016, and the closing of our capital campaign. I...
