Suddenly, amazingly, it’s starting: Edmonton’s summer festival season

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Edmonton’s magic box, the season of summer (and summer-ish) festivals, opens this very week on stages here. And that’s just the start (think Pandora).

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Common Ground Arts’ RISER New Works Festival, designed to support, profile, and mentor indie theatre artists and companies along their oft-arduous path, returns Friday for a second annual edition. It’s a two-year Common Ground Arts modification of a visionary national initiative by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre in 2014. In 2022, Edmonton was the first RISER location in a cross-country diaspora, and Common Ground Arts, home to such innovative indie projects as the annual Found Fest, and very well-connected in indie circles, was a natural host company.

At the 2026 edition of the festivities, audiences will see three shows at the Backstage Theatre that return for more developed productions — as per RISER’s two-year format — at festivals in 2027. POCBS, an offering last year’s RISER, for example, will be at this summer’s Fringe.

The Light of Other Skies by Liam Monoghan, RISER New Play Festival. Photo supplied.

Memory Box Theatre’s production of The Light of Other Skies, a work-in-progress by playwright/producer/director Liam Monaghan, tells a little-known Canadian love story: the star architect Arthur Erickson and his interior designer partner Francisco Kripacz. Part archival and documentary, the story is told in a theatrical way that enlists projections and music, through the eyes of a young Queer writer looking to connect with this country’s hidden Queer history. It’ll be at Theatre Outré’s Quaint, Quirky and QUEER Cabaret & Festival in 2027.

Postal Prophets, by singer/songwriter-turned-playwright D’orjay Jackson, which had an initial outing at last year’s RISER New Works Festival, is a hugely ambitious new musical set in a dystopian future that’s “governed by an AI system on a dying planet” with its own resistance fighters. A battle between humanoids and artifical intelligence ensues.

be(Longing) by Philip Hackborn, RISER New Works Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

Be(Longing), a solo piece created and performed by Philip Hackborn, explores the experience of being multi-racial east-Asian, through formative cultural influences like folktales. As billed it’s the foundation of what’s is designed to performed next year by a larger-scale ensemble piece in which Hackborn will be joined by other east-Asian artists.

Tickets, show descriptions, and a full schedule of performances Friday through Sunday, are at commongroundarts.ca.

More about this later, but the Common Ground Arts season includes a fascinating six-encounter 2026 lineup for Found Fest July 9 to 12 in locations where artists meet audiences in unexpected site-specific locations. Tickets are on sale in June. And post-summer, look for the return of Common Ground Arts’ Prairie MainStage Series, returning with Tiny Bear Jaws’ production of I Don’t Even Miss You and Gillian Patterson’s i am your spaniel; or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare from Winnipeg’s We Quit Theatre. I’ve seen earlier iterations of the former, which is terrific. And I saw a sneak preview of the latter at the Common Ground season launch last month, and it’s irresistibly bonkers. Tickets go on sale later this summer.

Big news from Common Ground: The 2026 season is the last for indefatigable managing producer Mac Brock, who’s exiting after five years, along with Found Fest director Whittyn Jason. Common Ground’s new managing producer is Rainier Pearl-Styles. And three new Common Ground producer/curators, all artists with Common Ground on their resumés will produce RISER (Sarah Emslie), Found Festival (Salem Zurch), and the next CG season (Hayley Moorhouse).

Goupil et Kosmao, International Children’s Festival of the Arts. Promotion photo.

•The arrival of a full crop of dandelions is a signal, and a tip-off, and it has been for 45-plus springs. It’s time for the International Children’s Festival of the Arts, that venerable spring institution, to return to the banks of the mighty Sturgeon in St. Albert.

Six ticketed feature performances, from across the country, the U.S., Australia and France, happen Friday through Sunday. Puppets, music, dance, and unclassifiable combos of all of those. There’s physical comedy from a virtuoso circus juggler who can balance a samurai sword on a stick he holds in his mouth (no kidding): Yuki the Juggler. There’s a classic comedy duo inspired by Tex Avery and Pixar: magician Kosmao and his assistant Goupil. Plus a musical with catchy songs: Disney’s Finding Nemo, Jr. from the St. Albert Children’s Theatre. And the festival includes lots of immersive free activities and experiences, too. The Kids Fest runs Friday through Sunday in assorted St. Albert venues. The schedule, show descriptions, and tickets are all available at stalbert.ca/exp/childfest/tickets/.

Siegfried, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price. Set and video by Andy Moro, costumes by Jessica Oostergo

•And, hey, there’s an opera this week, too. Siegfried is not a festival in itself, true, but consider the context (and think big): it’s the third instalment of Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle. The Edmonton Opera production of Jonathan Dove’s chamber version of  Siegfried happens through Sunday on the Citadel’s thrust stage, the Maclab, at 685 seats an intriguingly intimate, up-close space for such large-scale storytelling.

Edmonton Opera has already staged the first two Ring chapters, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, in previous seasons. And they’ve announced they will complete the Ring Cycle, their first, with part four, Gotterdammerung, to come. Siegfried is the Canadian debut for the innovative Greek-born London-based director Radula Gaitanou, known for reimagining classical works for contemporary audiences. Simon Rivard conducts. Samuel Levine stars as Siegfried, the peripatetic innocent who wanders through the world, and wakes up the warrior Brünnhilde from her slumbers behind a wall of fire. Now there’s a challenge for the deluxe designer Andy Moros, who’s returned for this third Ring opera.

Siegfried runs Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday on the Citadel’s Maclab stage. Tickets: tickets.edmontonopera.com

Continuing:

L’UIniThéâtre’s season-ending production of buanderie/boulangerie is onstage at La Cité francophone through Sunday. Steve Jodoin directs the new Canadian rom-com by Sophie Gareau-Brennan. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

At the Mayfield, Kate Ryan’s production of the musical Footloose continues to kick off its Sunday shoes through June 14. See the review here. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.