SummerWorks

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SummerWorks

🎉 Performance Festival >>> August 6-16, 2026
💪Supporting artists and engaging audiences year-round

06/21/2026

YOU! BETTER! (Summer)WORK! ✨

We’re so proud of all the amazing artists that come through SummerWorks. 💛 In comes... SUMMERWORKING! Our brand-new series highlighting a few artists and their past work in the Festival... and MORE!

Today’s Highlight: AWAKE & STILL DROWNING

AWAKE & STILL DROWNING is a 30-minute shared experience in VR and unsuspecting performance. It is a cautionary fable about the day Nova Scotia becomes an island, told through a combination of virtual reality and group choreography in which watching and performing signify the high cost of human migration when the exploited ocean takes back what is hers.

And get ready to hear ALL the amazing programming coming June 23! Right here! On the socials! And on our website! ... WOOHOO! Fun. 🎉💫

06/19/2026

YOU! BETTER! (Summer)WORK! ✨

We’re so proud of all the amazing artists that come through SummerWorks. 💛 In comes... SUMMERWORKING! Our brand-new series highlighting a few artists and their past work in the Festival... and MORE!

Today’s Highlight: JASON

Through a series of attempts at sometimes impossible tasks, Jason attempts to transform emotional emptiness into pleasure. Using the body, a custom (and fu**ed up) men’s suit, and a series of objects, this solo performance work tackles themes of transformation, shame, and embodiment from a transmasculine experience.

And get ready to hear ALL the amazing programming coming June 23! Right here! On the socials! And on our website! ... WOOHOO! Fun. 🎉💫

06/16/2026

YOU! BETTER! (Summer)WORK! ✨

We’re so proud of all the amazing artists that come through SummerWorks. 💛 In comes... SUMMERWORKING! Our brand-new series highlighting a few artists and their past work in the Festival... and MORE!

Today’s Highlight: THE CHAINS

The Chains is a play written in the second-person singular—a performance in the shape of a personality test. Its questions survey three teenagers in Toronto at the opening of the 21st century: love, despair, the ethics of violence, Sophocles’s Antigone, Mike Harris’s “Common-Sense Revolution,” and the great lacuna of the War on Terror.

And get ready to hear ALL the amazing programming coming June 23! Right here! On the socials! And on our website! ... WOOHOO! Fun. 🎉💫

06/15/2026

YOU! BETTER! (Summer)WORK! ✨

We’re so proud of all the amazing artists that come through SummerWorks. 💛 In comes... SUMMERWORKING! Our brand-new series highlighting a few artists and their past work in the Festival... and MORE!

Today’s Highlight: Xilopango

Xilopango is a contemporary dance-theatre work by Salvadorian-Canadian-Chinteña choreographer Irma Villafuerte, performed by a five-person ensemble. This powerful piece explores intergenerational memory, migration, and matrilineal resilience through a Central American contemporary dance lens.

And get ready to hear ALL the amazing programming coming June 23! Right here! On the socials! And on our website! ... WOOHOO! Fun. 🎉💫

06/11/2026

WE NEED YOUR HELP! 💛✨✈️

Dear SummerWorks community…

This year, as we reach out to you to support the Festival with a charitable donation, we do so with the goal of facilitating vital cultural exchange between local and international artists and audiences.

As Toronto prepares to welcome the world for a major international sports event, SummerWorks is preparing for its own unique influx of international guests this summer. This August, the 2026 SummerWorks Performance Festival will present dynamic and innovative live performance works, with artists and creative collaborators joining us from ten (10) different countries and regions: Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iran, Mexico, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

While we have established supportive partnerships with funders and organizations from many of the countries represented to help bring these artists to Toronto, these plans were solidified before recent global events caused international travel to become even more challenging and expensive than before.

When you make a donation to SummerWorks this year, in any amount, you reinforce the unique role of cultural exchange through the arts in creating a more connected, compassionate, and conscious society.

Donate today!
https://summerworks.ca/donate/

05/29/2026

Meet our 2026 SummerWorks Team! 💛✨

We’re so SO incredibly excited to bring you the 36th SummerWorks Festival to you with the help of these incredible artists (and spreadsheet magicians). We can’t wait to see you this August. ☀️🖤

Stay tuned for a full programming announcement coming NEXT MONTH! 🗓️🎉

05/28/2026

Here’s more of our 2026 team in 2016! 😍💕

Meet the full team on Friday but for now, here’s a little … this time ON THURSDAY! 😂🔥

04/20/2026

💛 INTRODUCING the 2026/27 Associate Artists! 💛

We are thrilled to welcome five (5) artists and creative collaborators into our Associates Artists program this year. While they develop powerful new projects over the next two years at SummerWorks, they will present works-in-development as part of this year’s Festival lineup:

NOVA BHATTACHARYA & SUVENDRINI LENA | Tandava
Co-created by playwright Suvendrini Lena and choreographer Nova Bhattacharya, Tandava draws on verses of 6th century Tamil poet Karaikkal Ammaiyar. Set against events that occurred in the North and East of Sri Lanka during the civil war, including the burning of a library, and disappearing of Tamil civilians, Tandava asks: where is justice for the disappeared, and how do we honour their memories through a performance experience that offers a space for collective healing?

AMY NOSTBAKKEN, NORAH SADAVA & VICKY ARAICO | Little White Room
An American, a Mexican, and a Canadian walk into a U.S. customs detention cell… Little White Room is 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. Three women are trapped together in purgatorial space where power, injustice, and one dying air vent collide. The work exposes how authoritarian systems shape behaviour in big and small ways, pointing a finger at the patriarchal forces that quietly and violently turn us against one another.

Get to know these amazing artists along with our current Associate Artists: The Switch Collective, Johnnie McNamara Walker, and Chimerik 似像 !

Stay tuned for more SummerWorks 2026 updates... 👀

Image of Nova Bhattacharya by Dahlia Katz, Image of Suvendrini Lena courtesy of artist, Image of Vicky Araico courtesy of artist. Images of Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbaaken by Vanessa Heins

Address

#423/401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, ON
M5V3A8

Telephone

+14165978594

Website

https://www.summerworks.ca/

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