A creative collaborator and community builder at the forefront of contemporary performance, SummerWorks is thrilled to announce a bold and creative 2024 Festival with 40+ projects across four streams of programming, featuring 100+ artists and creative collaborators from local, national, and international contexts. This year’s Festival theme is Survival Mode.

SummerWorks will engage with this idea subtly and bluntly, with nuanced complexity, while holding space for diverse perspectives and lived experiences.

SummerWorks Presentations – Growing Up Regent

This program includes fully developed new works, offering a snapshot of contemporary boundary-defying performance.

Growing Up Regent, is a new play highlighting authentic characters rooted in the lived experience and diasporic stories of Toronto’s Regent Park community. It will have its world premiere at this year’s festival.

This play and the web series of the same name have been possible thanks to Kick Start Starts, a community organization that provides opportunities to explore multiple art forms, by producing new work, providing professional training, and offering projects in school and community settings. They also run ‘The Regent Project’, a program for diverse emerging artists, ages 14 to 29, from Regent Park and beyond, providing free training in acting, writing, theatre, film and television production.

Using stories by community members starting points, this new play is based on the web series. Abdullahi Ali (lead actor and co-lead writer) and Amanda Pillegi (actor) spoke with me about their respective work on the web series, working on this new play, and new

Growing Up Regent will premiere on August 1, 2024 at Aki Studio. For tickets and additional information, go to SummerWorks.ca.

Consider supporting Kick Start Arts and their work, including ‘The Regent Project’, by visiting their GoFundMe page.

Photos courtesy of Kick Start Arts / SummerWorks.