Thank you for attending the 33rd SummerWorks Performance Festival. We are excited to host you in Toronto for 11 days of diverse encounters and curious collaborations.

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This page includes lots of pertinent information for your time at SummerWorks, whether you are joining us for the bespoke industry gathering between August 5-8, or you are joining us throughout the 11-day Festival.

Scroll down to view information about all of our specific events and activities, as well as ticketing information, a hotel discount code, and the overall schedule for the August 5-8 industry gathering.

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At this moment, we invite all industry gathering participants to register (RSVP) for our industry-specific events from August 5-8, including:

• Industry Welcome / Opening Reception
• Meet with Citadel + Compagnie
• Meet with Native Earth Performing Arts
• Switching Regent(s): Making Street Theatre Magic
• Embodied Togethering with Wild Soma
• International Choreographic Interlink: Toronto-Taipei
• Industry Closing Reception

*Scroll down to view all of these event descriptions.

This year, we are offering two (2) Industry Pass options:

• Industry 8-Pass: includes up to eight (8) tickets.
• Industry 4-Pass: includes up to four (4) tickets.

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These Industry Passes include access to tickets for the following eight (8) performances:

• The Seventh Fire
• i am your spaniel, or, a Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson
• Lady M (Margaret)
• DOUBLE
• Ballroom, Too
• LOOP
• 52 (navigation) / within sensation
• TRUCK

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These Industry Pass links (just below) are PRIVATE, so please do not share with anyone else.

Once you purchase your Pass, you will receive an email with a unique coupon code, which you will use to book your individual tickets. We strongly encourage you to book your specific tickets, as soon as possible, as Festival tickets tend to sell quite quickly, and are subject to availability.

You are also welcome to book individual single tickets to any performance, by visiting our Festival Ticketing Page.

There are also many other FREE Festival events/activities, and some that require advance reservations. We also strongly encourage you to directly reserve to these events as soon as possible.

SummerWorks has confirmed a discounted rate at the Ace Hotel Toronto.

Ace Hotel Toronto, 51 Camden St, Toronto, ON M5V 1V2

WEBSITE | MAP

• 35% off the Classic rate
• 23% off of our Classic rate (August 4 & 5 only)

Booking Code: SWRK23

For those of you joining us for the industry gathering, specifically between August 5-8, here is the recommended path through the Festival within these four (4) days.

This schedule includes a few industry-specific events which require a reservation (RSVP). These events are highlighted in bold within the schedule below, and you can find more detailed event descriptions by scrolling further down this page.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 5TH

• 12:00 – 1:20pm   //   The Seventh Fire (option 1)
• 2:00 – 3:00pm   //   DOUBLE
• 5:00 – 6:15pm   //   Industry Welcome & Opening Reception

The Theatre Centre Café/Bar (1115 Queen St West) *includes one (1) complimentary drink (details + RSVP below)

• 7:00 – 8:00pm   //   Lady M (Margaret) (option 1 – world premiere)
• 8:30 – 10:00pm   //   i am your spaniel (option 1 – world premiere)

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SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH

• 12:00 – 1:20pm   //   The Seventh Fire (option 2)
• 2:00 – 3:00pm   //   Meet with Citadel + Compagnie

The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street) (details + RSVP below)

• 4:00 – 5:00pm   //   52 (navigation) + within sensation double-bill
• 7:00 – 8:00pm   //   Meet with Native Earth Performing Arts

Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St East, Suite 250) (details + RSVP below)

• 9:00 – 10:15pm   //   Switching Regent(s) (details + RSVP below)

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MONDAY, AUGUST 7TH

• 12:00 – 1:20pm   //   The Seventh Fire (option 3)
• 5:30 – 7:30pm   //   TERRAFORM (artist & community chat) – (drop-in anytime, no registration required)
• 8:00 – 9:00pm   //   TRUCK

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TUESDAY, AUGUST 8TH

• 11:00-12:15pm   //   Embodied Togethering with Wild Soma
  

The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street) (details + RSVP below)

• 2:00 – 3:30pm   //   International Choreographic Interlink: Toronto – Taipei (details + RSVP below)
• 3:30-4:30pm   //   Industry Closing Reception

The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street, Toronto) – *includes one (1) complimentary drink and light snacks (details + RSVP below)

• 5:00 – 6:00pm   //   The Lettuce Head Experience at Cabbagetown Farmers’ Market (no registration required)
• 7:00 – 8:00pm   //   Lady M (Margaret), (option 2)
• 8:30 – 10:00pm   //   i am your spaniel, (option 2)

Join us at The Theatre Centre Café/Bar (1115 Queen St West) for a welcome reception with SummerWorks co-leadership, Michael Caldwell and Morgan Norwich. Share a drink with some of the Festival artists and staff, as well as our industry peers.

*All registered industry gathering participants will receive one (1) complimentary beverage.

This event is generously supported by Ontario Presents and The Theatre Centre.

In this informal and relaxed sharing session, dance artists-in-residence with Citadel + Compagnie‘s Creative Incubator program will share excerpts of their work onscreen, discuss their ideas and inspirations for upcoming creative work, and reveal aspects of their own individual creative practices and processes.

This session is hosted and facilitated by Citadel + Compagnie’s Artistic Director, Laurence Lemieux, with dance artists Heidi Strauss (adelheid), Nova Bhattacharya (Nova Dance), Naishi Wang, and Syreeta Hector.

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Citadel + Compagnie is an artistic and community entity with a dual purpose. It is at once both place and people.

The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street) is a remarkable building nestled in the Regent Park neighbourhood of Toronto. Since 2012, The Citadel has established itself as an open and welcoming space for artists to rehearse, create and perform, and where the community can learn, communicate, and share.

The Citadel also acts as home to its own professional dance company, (Compagnie de la Citadelle) led by artistic director Laurence Lemieux, and plays host to a range of creative incubator and residency programs for some of Canada’s most interesting choreographers and dance companies.

Join Joelle Peters (Artistic Director) and Himanshu Sitlani (Managing Director) at the Native Earth Performing Arts office (585 Dundas St East, Suite 250), for some light refreshments, as they share a sneak peek of the 2023-24 season programming.

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Native Earth Performing Arts in Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Currently celebrating its 41st year, Native Earth is dedicated to creating, developing and producing professional artistic expressions of the Indigenous experience in Canada. Through stage productions (theatre, dance, and multi-disciplinary art), script development, apprenticeships, and internships, Native Earth seeks to fulfill a community of artistic visions. It is a vision that is inclusive and reflective of the artistic directions of members of the Indigenous community who actively participate in the arts.

Join The Switch Collective and artist residency participants as they offer a collaboratively-created public sharing of their performance-based work. This outdoor public sharing starts at Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St East), and moves through the Regent Park area.

Over three days, The Switch Collective plants seeds in Regent Park through an artist residency, inviting participants to develop their skills and ideas for political street-based performance art, and play with the Switch Methodology, weaving interdisciplinary artistic practice, activism, and personal experience with the hxstory, environment and community of Regent Park. This residency culminates in this collaboratively-created offering shared with the public.

(Note: limited capacity, once this specific event registration is confirmed, you will receive an email confirmation.)

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The Switch Collective has been creating radical, Queer, interdisciplinary street art since 2016. Over time, a methodology has emerged, one which successfully forms a container where truly radical, collaborative, political art can grow and emerge within. It’s a methodology based in transformative justice, queering spaces, environmental studies, interdisciplinary art practice, and semi-improvisational theatre.

This project is part of SummerWorks’ Accessibility & Community Wellness Program, generously funded by the Aubrey & Marla Dan Foundation.

Wild Soma will guide industry gathering participants and Festival artists through intentionally-designed practices and experiences that support making meaningful connections in community.

While honouring the SummerWorks’ core values of creative risk and curiosity, care and collaboration, diversity and difference, as well as the 2023 Festival theme: diverse encounters and curious collaborations, Wild Soma aims:

• to seed new relationships by engaging and interacting with new people in a supportive environment;
• to activate, delight and awaken our senses;
• to meet each other through aesthetic experiences.

Everyone is welcome to come as they are and to engage in kind exchanges through familiar languages of non-verbal communication, including eye contact and everyday gestures.

This event happens at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street).

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Wild Soma is a collective of experienced embodied artist facilitators, formed in 2021 to support the research and practice of embodiment as a world-making process. Core members Julia Aplin, Shannon Litzenberger, Andrea Nann and Roula Said are established dance artists, performance makers, movement facilitators and community mobilizers. Their shared interest in embodiment practice as a world-making proposal is the basis of their collaboration. Interested in animating the self-in-the-world relationship, Wild Soma is a platform to research, design, prototype and experiment with interventions that centre new ways of being through aesthetic embodied participatory experience.

Three Taipei-based movement artists share their artistry and creative practices in this informal and intimate sharing session. Wu-kang Chen (HORSE), Fangas Nayaw (Fist and Cake Productions), and Pin-wen Su (Kua-bo Dance Theatre) exemplify the Taiwanese dance scene; they are open, curious and collaborative, they hold space, generously build opportunities for others, and are anchored by authentic relations within community.

Joined by Taiwanese producer Wen Huang, the artists will share elements of their creative work and engage in a live exchange with Canadian artists, discussing the ecosystems, networks, and aesthetic/cultural perspectives from these two distinct social, political, cultural, and geographic environs.

Hosted by Toronto-based dance performance artists Andrea Nann, Heidi Strauss, and Michael Caldwell, this session happens at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament Street).

This session is presented in partnership with Citadel + Compagnie and International Choreographic Interlink, with support from We Island Dance Festival and Dance on Fluid, and with funding from the National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan.

(Note: limited capacity, once this specific event registration is confirmed, you will receive an email confirmation.)

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International Choreographic Interlink (ICI) is an emergent platform for international exchange and collaboration, and was formed as a rethink button on working methods and assumptions sorely in need of reimagining. Since September 2020, eight Canadian and Taiwanese artists and producers have embarked on monthly online meetings, providing a space for collective creation, experimentation, and critical thinking at a time of forced isolation.

A closing reception for the industry gathering at the 2023 Festival, sharing space and diving into informal conversations at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (304 Parliament St) with Festival artists and industry peers.

*All registered industry gathering participants will receive one (1) complimentary beverage, along with light snacks.

This event is generously supported by Ontario Presents.