SummerWorks Performance Festival returns to Toronto stages for a 35th year from August 7 to 17. For 11 days, the Festival offers theatre, dance, music, and live art at a variety of venues and spaces across the city.
The theme of the festival, Back to the Future | Forward to the Past, dives into ideas revolving around time — past, present, and future. Audiences will be able to catch performances, experiences and experiments that explore the notion of time in theatres, public parks, galleries, transit hubs, and other creative spaces.
The theme was inspired by the words of Dr. Elder Duke Redbird, and curated by Artistic Director Michael Caldwell.
“For our 35th anniversary, we’re not just looking back — we’re pausing in the present to listen carefully, and to imagine what’s ahead,” says Michael Caldwell, Artistic Director, in a statement.
“This milestone Festival is filled with contemporary performance works that examine memory, identity, ritual, and resistance through a temporal lens. The artists are reflecting on their histories and lived experiences while boldly pushing towards an imagined future. The result is strikingly intimate and deeply connected.”
Fat Fables by the AMY Project (Photo: Roya DelSol)
Summerworks: Festival Highlights
Summerworks 2025 includes more than 40 projects and over 200 artists. Here’s a look at a few of the highlights.
- Cake, a solo performance by Toronto-based actor, producer, director, writer, and host Wayne Burns that confronts male beauty standards;
- Graveyards and Gardens, an immersive dance/music concert that brings together award-winning choreographer and dancer Vanessa Goodman and four-time Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Caroline Shaw;
- Fat Fables by the AMY Project, a celebration of outsized aspirations with poetry, monologue, rants, and drag, “dreaming of a world where we exist beyond our size”;
- A reworking and reimagination of the three plays within Jamaican-Canadian award-winning dub poet and theatre artist d’bi.young anitafrika’s The Sankofa Trilogy;
- Florentine-born director, installation artist, playwright and performer Daniele Bartolini and two-time Jessie Award winning actor Vincent Leblanc-Beaudoin’s Le Concierge, an atmospheric ambulatory mystery that takes place in a Toronto secondary school.
- Performance interventions expand on the possibilities of performance in various ways.
- Phalanx: Revival by Moonhorse Dance theatre, a reimagining of the 1998 work by DNA Theatre, set in Victoria Memorial Square Park, and featuring a cast of veteran Toronto performers, all over the age of 45;
- Xilopango by Salvadorian-Canadian-Chinteña choreographer Irma Villafuerte, creates a dance/theatre work based on six years of land-based research and personal history as a response to political and environmental unrest.
International Works
Several works in the program come from international companies.
Taiwan
- Leftover Market by Su PinWen: an interdisciplinary solo performance inspired by the term, “剩女Shèng Nǚ”, meaning “Leftover Women”, a term still used in Chinese-speaking societies for unmarried women over the age of 27, featuring Taiwanese Mandarin and English pop music.
- FreeSteps — NiNi by choreographer Su Wei Chia: a site-specific exploration of contours, forms, and movements that pursue a pure physical language in public spaces across Toronto.
South Korea
- The Ghosts Chat: What is a Festival? by Baram Company: a new experimental play about the ghosts whose lives were sacrificed in the pursuit of human joy.
Find performances details, tickets, and passes [HERE].
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