SummerWorks Efficiency Competition returns to Toronto levels for a thirty fifth 12 months from August 7 to 17. For 11 days, the Competition provides theatre, dance, music, and stay artwork at a wide range of venues and areas throughout town.
The theme of the competition, Again to the Future | Ahead to the Previous, dives into concepts revolving round time — previous, current, and future. Audiences will be capable to catch performances, experiences and experiments that discover the notion of time in theatres, public parks, galleries, transit hubs, and different artistic areas.
The theme was impressed by the phrases of Dr. Elder Duke Redbird, and curated by Creative Director Michael Caldwell.
“For our thirty fifth anniversary, we’re not simply trying again — we’re pausing within the current to pay attention fastidiously, and to think about what’s forward,” says Michael Caldwell, Creative Director, in a press release.
“This milestone Competition is full of modern efficiency works that study reminiscence, id, ritual, and resistance by way of a temporal lens. The artists are reflecting on their histories and lived experiences whereas boldly pushing in the direction of an imagined future. The result’s strikingly intimate and deeply linked.”

Summerworks: Competition Highlights
Summerworks 2025 consists of greater than 40 tasks and over 200 artists. Right here’s a take a look at a couple of of the highlights.
- Cake, a solo efficiency by Toronto-based actor, producer, director, author, and host Wayne Burns that confronts male magnificence requirements;
- Graveyards and Gardens, an immersive dance/music live performance that brings collectively award-winning choreographer and dancer Vanessa Goodman and four-time Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Caroline Shaw;
- Fats Fables by the AMY Mission, a celebration of outsized aspirations with poetry, monologue, rants, and drag, “dreaming of a world the place we exist past our dimension”;
- A transforming and reimagination of the three performs inside Jamaican-Canadian award-winning dub poet and theatre artist d’bi.younger anitafrika’s The Sankofa Trilogy;
- Florentine-born director, set up artist, playwright and performer Daniele Bartolini and two-time Jessie Award profitable actor Vincent Leblanc-Beaudoin’s Le Concierge, an atmospheric ambulatory thriller that takes place in a Toronto secondary faculty.
- Efficiency interventions increase on the chances of efficiency in varied methods.
- Phalanx: Revival by Moonhorse Dance theatre, a reimagining of the 1998 work by DNA Theatre, set in Victoria Memorial Sq. Park, and that includes a forged of veteran Toronto performers, everywhere in the age of 45;
- Xilopango by Salvadorian-Canadian-Chinteña choreographer Irma Villafuerte, creates a dance/theatre work primarily based on six years of land-based analysis and private historical past as a response to political and environmental unrest.

Worldwide Works
A number of works in this system come from worldwide firms.
Taiwan
- Leftover Market by Su PinWen: an interdisciplinary solo efficiency impressed by the time period, “剩女Shèng Nǚ”, which means “Leftover Girls”, a time period nonetheless utilized in Chinese language-speaking societies for single ladies over the age of 27, that includes Taiwanese Mandarin and English pop music.
- FreeSteps — NiNi by choreographer Su Wei Chia: a site-specific exploration of contours, kinds, and actions that pursue a pure bodily language in public areas throughout Toronto.
South Korea
- The Ghosts Chat: What’s a Competition? by Baram Firm: a brand new experimental play in regards to the ghosts whose lives have been sacrificed within the pursuit of human pleasure.
Discover performances particulars, tickets, and passes [HERE].
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