SummerWorks, Toronto, ON

I have attended many SummerWorks performances over the years and volunteered last year for the first time. I volunteered this year again and did two shifts.

SummerWorks is a leader, collaborator and community builder at the forefront of contemporary performance – asking crucial questions; nurturing artistic innovation; and presenting new works that reflect the complexity and diversity of our society.

BACK TO THE FUTURE | FORWARD TO THE PAST

Entering our 35th year, we’re back 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, join us as we gather 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.

With 40+ projects and over 200 artists, SummerWorks 2025 is a space to gather in curiosity, conversation and complexity - to mark the past, anchor in the present, and move collectively into imagined futures.

Uncover your next magical experience at the 2025 SummerWorks Performance Festival!

I attended the volunteer orientation training that was on Friday, August 1.

Sunday I was at the Citadel (on Parliament and Dundas E).

I ushered for Sex Goddess.

Created and performed by award winning multidisciplinary artist Riel Reddick-Stevens and developed in House and Body’s playwrights initiative; SEX GODDESS is a theatrical mixtape that combines Hip Hop/R&B music, comedy, and heightened storytelling to explore the relationships between power, bodily autonomy, and sense of self in a patriarchal world and business. 

 This solo show follows Rayna, an emerging pop star who is grappling with who she is and what she wants to create. At the listening party for her new album, Rayna recalls one long, wild night that changed her life and perspective of self forever.

I then ushered for Gaylord.

It was impossible to be a Queer person living in Toronto in the 2000s and not feel the gravitational pull of Will Munro. His monthly party Vazaleen brought gay nightlife into macho rock venues. His y-front underwear-based art projects scandalized the prudes and brought tighty-whities back into vogue. And his beloved bar The Beaver cemented Queen West as the home of Toronto’s alternative Queer scene. But in 2010, after a two-year struggle with a rare brain cancer – at the infuriatingly young age of 35 – he was gone. And Toronto has never been the same. 

SummerWorks Associate Artist Johnnie McNamara Walker presents a staged reading of a new play-in-development inspired by this legendary figure. GAYLORD is a love letter to the life and legacy of Will Munro, and a séance for a just-out-of-reach moment in our city’s past.

This evening I volunteered at The Theatre Centre (on Queen W and Dovercourt).

I ushered for Jason.

Through a series of attempts at sometimes impossible tasks, Jason attempts to transform emotional emptiness into pleasure. Using the body, a custom (and fucked up) men’s suit, and a series of objects, this solo performance work tackles themes of transformation, shame, and embodiment from a transmasculine experience.