Entering its 35th year, SummerWorks Performance Festival returns with a landmark season of bold performance, intimate creative experiences, and daring artistic interventions exploring time — personal and collective, real and imagined. From August 7–17, 2025, artists and audiences will gather across Toronto for 11 days of theatre, dance, music, and live art in theatres, in public parks, in galleries, at transit hubs, and in the spaces between.
This year’s Festival theme, Back to the Future | Forward to the Past invites reflection, imagination, and disruption with bold creative expressions that dive deep into temporality, exploring and questioning the past, present, and future, with a gentle curiosity and a critical ferocity. Inspired by the words of Dr. Elder Duke Redbird, and curated by Artistic Director Michael Caldwell, the 2025 edition features works that dive into our memories, our legacies, our bodies, and our relationship to time.
