Welcome to the 36th SummerWorks Performance Festival.

I’ll admit it. I have written and rewritten this welcome message over a dozen times.

There’s no question; we’re living through dark times. And it’s been a challenge to find the ‘fun’ that is now so linked to the SummerWorks brand.

With everyday inflection points happening all around the globe, the state of the world feels more out-of-control, racing faster with each new headline or post. Some days, we can barely catch our breath in the midst of this growing sense of tension and division, and deepening isolation.

Despite this, we long for connection and understanding. 

How do we respond to the urgency of this moment in time?

This year, Festival artists dive further into radical intimacy with innovative live performance that reveals the current urgency in our diverse communities, highlighting the dynamic creative responses to this troubling moment in our histories. 

The 2026 Festival theme Fight | Flight directly references the well-known physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, an attack, or a threat to survival. Within our thinking and sensing, and with the suggestion of Fight | Flight this year, it’s important to note that this proposition is not meant to lessen the very real responses that many individuals have to troubling and traumatic situations, where the act of survival is life itself. It is also not intended as a binary (fight or flight), nor does it exclude any other kind of acute stress response, or the complex and overlapping nature of such responses.

For us, Fight | Flight serves simply as one portal through which you, as a Festival audience, may pass, to understand and uncover more about the incredible and deeply-considered work within this year’s programming. Across the 2026 Festival, artists root themselves in the notion of place, and in community, in ancestry, and in 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.

At the same time, I encourage you to take a deep dive into our curated Festival program to reveal all of the intriguing links between each unique presentation. Whether it’s theatrical works that expose vital narratives from wrongly-incarcerated individuals; or interdisciplinary works that call attention to our collective impact on land and water, and all our human/animal relations; or movement-based works that dichotomously challenge the endurance and highlight the fragility of the body, through hyper-physicality and an embodied deepening of practice; or site-responsive works that subvert what we know, by positioning narratives in unique locations, to conjure myth, fantasy, and fun; each creative project within the Festival urgently responds and connects to the world around us, and the profoundly complex and beautifully chaotic world inside us all.

In addition, we are thrilled to present one of our most international summer Festivals to date, with artists from across Canada and around the world bringing radically intimate and deeply imaginative works to our city.

Our strategic vision for SummerWorks as an international hub for contemporary performance is now tangibly happening within this year’s Festival programming, alongside our continued commitment to support the development of new work, to nurture artistic risk and experimentation, and to engage diverse audiences with local, national, and international independent artists and small-scale companies to collectively and creatively envision our future together.

The work in this year’s Festival is positioned in stark contrast to our isolated and disconnected existence, by basking in all the beautiful, incidental, deliberate, and messy connections between us – a reflection of our lived experience in time and space. I look forward to sharing this time and space with you, and perhaps, we can keep up the fight — to continue to stay connected, to strive for joy, pleasure, and fun, and to write and rewrite our own unique stories together.

Enjoy the Festival!

— Michael Caldwell, Artistic Director

Click here to uncover more about our 2026 Festival programming.