Expanding the possibilities
of performance
Tickets on Sale > July 13th!
Performance Festival
August 6-16, 2026
Ömer Yükseker & Rajvi Dedhia
How can we honour the disappeared?
Drawing from the verses of the 6th-century Tamil poet-saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar and shaped by the histories of the Sri Lankan civil war, Tandava invites audiences into a ritual-infused performance of devotion and remembrance.
Moving through themes of creation, destruction and transformation, the work weaves percussive movement with Tamil language. It investigates elements of ancient practices that bind words and lands through inscribing and preserving text on ola leaf manuscripts.
Tandava is an interdisciplinary meditation on collective healing and affirms the belief that the body can hold and communicate what words cannot, exploring the persistence of painful memories, grief and resilience. You’ll feel the space held with love as the stories of those lost without rites or recognition are honoured.
Creator, Choreographer & Performer: Nova Bhattacharya
Creator, Director & Playwright: Suvendrini Lena
Performers: Karthiha Parthiban & Purawai Vyas
Lighting Designer: Vishmayaa Jeyamoorthy
Composer: Kalaisan Kalaichelvan
Projection Artist: Ge (Luke) Lu
Outside Eye: Victoria Mata
Created with support from The Metcalf Foundation; The Theatre Creator’s Reserve, including Cahoots Theatre, Canadian Stage and Fu-Gen Theatre Company. The Open Space Programme at The National Ballet of Canada, and Nova Dance’s Long Term Residency with The Theatre Centre.
Presented as part of SummerWorks’ Associate Artists program.
Sensory: burning of incense / camphor.
Content Advisories for this project are available here. This link will open to a new webpage that lists Content Advisories for ALL SummerWorks 2026 projects. Please take care as you review this list.
SummerWorks Performance Festival
August 6-16, 2026
Tickets on Sale > July 13th!
This year’s Festival theme, Fight | Flight brings forward urgent creative responses to this troubling moment in time. Across the 2026 Festival, artists root themselves in place, community, ancestry, and 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.
