How are you reading this? On a bus? With a screenreader? In translation? With 12 other tabs open, and several breaks?
Chances are, however you access this article will be inseparable from your experience of the article itself. Form, content, transmission, and reception are always intertwined — a fact that this year’s SummerWorks Performance Festival has made a core of its programming. The curated festival’s 36th edition features a range of works by Disabled and neurodivergent artists where the medium is very much the message. In several productions, accessibility isn’t an accessory, a band-aid, or a scaffold; it’s DNA.
Heritage Building in Prime Location, a work in development adapted by Birgit Schreyer Duarte and Dawn Jani Birley from the German play Altbau in Zentraler Lage, weaves together American Sign Language and English to tell a story of renters pushing back against eviction. Rot Hat, by Nate Yaffe, leads audiences through an improvised and unmasked theatrical ceremony. And Hello Sunshine!, by Sara Porter, is a more-than-musical that blends clown, memoir, and poetry with well-known pop songs about sunshine, as it charts Porter’s relationship to an autoimmune condition called Polymorphous Light Eruption (PMLE), colloquially known as sun allergy.
“My earliest thinking around light and sunshine were with the show’s lighting designer, Rebecca Picherack,” said Porter in a roundtable interview alongside Yaffe and Alex Bulmer, the dramaturg of Hello Sunshine!. “We had these long conversations not only about design, but about light itself, and the poetic potentials of light and darkness.”
Porter’s lived experience informed Hello Sunshine!’s sound as much as its lighting. “There’s a ubiquity of pop songs about sunlight,” she said. “There’s even a song called ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine.’ My experience of listening to it is different from somebody who doesn’t live with my particular light condition. Music is present in the piece, not simply as an aesthetic support or as a tonal colour, but to ask how we experience this kind of music in the world.”
Bulmer, who is Blind and works internationally as a theatre creator, performer, and consultant, emphasized how Hello Sunshine! expresses Porter’s lived experience through its aesthetics, without over-explaining PMLE.
“In life, people don’t have to understand our disability,” she said. “But the engagement with a person, with all that they bring, because of a particular way of being in the world, that’s what’s important. Hello Sunshine! is form-blending, gender-blending, everything-blending, and crip-infused. What could be better?”
Yaffe spoke about how Rot Hat draws on the archetype of the sacred clown that turns social norms on their heads — present in many societies throughout history — as well as on his own cultural upbringing and artistic background, in ways that can’t be separated from a neurodivergent perspective.
“I’m Jewish, and I’m inspired by Passover,” Yaffe reflected. “All these little rituals help us, by the end of the Seder dinner, remember the past, feel the year differently, mark the spring, talk about bondage, and come out the other side. So I feel like performance is very practical. It’s not egotistical or just to show virtuosity. It’s about being seen, and offering yourself to be seen.
“My dance, lately, comes from a practice of unmasking,” he continued. “‘What if I don’t try to censor, direct, or correct my body, or show tailored shapes?’ Thinking about neurodivergent bodies, allowing myself a certain amount of permission, can extend out to everybody. I try to give enough that the audience can feel held, but not beholden to me. They haven’t stumbled into a situation where they don’t understand the codes.’”
Heritage Building in Prime Location has a reckoning with codes — linguistic and building-related — at its core. The original text, written by playwright Raphaela Bardutzky in collaboration with Deaf artist Athena Lange, blended German with German Sign Language, and premiered in 2025 at the Schauspiel Leipzig. In a separate video call, Birley and Schreyer Duarte spoke about the challenges of transposing the play’s setting — a dilapidated apartment complex housing a mix of hearing, Deaf, and spectral inhabitants — to a Toronto milieu where characters speak English and ASL.
“It was really fascinating to think through the translation process,” said Schreyer Duarte. “In German, the title is Altbau in Zentraler Lage. ‘Altbau’ literally means ‘old structure.’ In the context of a residential building, it has a connotation of being worth more because it’s well-built. But the connotations of an ‘altbau’ in Toronto might be completely different from those of an ‘altbau’ in Germany. We have to make sure that, when people read the title, they have similar images right away.”
At the time of the interview, Schreyer Duarte had translated all of the original text into English. Birley, in turn, had just started to reimagine sections of this English translation in the distinct language of ASL. Her company, 1s1 Theatre, is dedicated to braiding together spoken and signed language from the very start of a creative process.
“It’s not copy-and-paste,” said Birley through an interpreter. “The signing version [of a translated text] depends on a person’s fluency — whether they’re conversational or native signers. The person’s capacity with the language will influence the translation that is produced. If you’re signing one person to another and both are fluent signers, then the conversation will look a certain way. But if the characters are different in their fluency, then it will change.
“It’s like a volume dial, not an on-off switch. We change the translation until it lands in a realistic place for the signer. People typically look at signed languages as an accommodation, but it’s about a culture, an identity, a way of being in the world and communicating.”
SummerWorks’ leadership has worked hard to avoid a copy-and-paste approach to accessibility. For the second year in a row, the festival has hired an access producer — Mandy MacLean — to coordinate the options available to patrons, as well as over 200 artists hailing from 10 different countries. Different shows have different access measures available depending on their form and content. Overall, resources include ASL interpretation, touch tours, audio description, relaxed performances, a d/Deaf-led box office, and active listeners.
“The thing that I love most about working at SummerWorks is that we’re very nimble,” said Morgan Norwich, the festival’s managing director. “Sometimes the spirit of access is just trying something, in the same way that creating performance is about just trying something. We’re doing our best to link access measures to the artists and the work, and to treat access as part of the creative process.”
It’s in that spirit that the Hello Sunshine! team wants to welcome Blind and low-vision audiences into Porter’s story. The August 13 performance will offer a touch tour and closed audio description via listening devices.
“The touch tour will include some of the physicality of the piece itself,” Bulmer said. “Not just describing the set and props, but having a chance to physicalize a dance that Sara does. We’re going to try to make it as physical as possible, because it’s such a physical piece.”
The process of developing description for Blind audiences feeds back into the dramaturgy of the show itself. “What description is doing is standing back and observing a show, then finding language to describe it,” said Bulmer. “To me, this is exactly what Sara’s struggling with throughout Hello Sunshine!: ‘How to put a code on something that’s invisible, without medicalizing a creative process?’ I think all good disabled art asks that question.”
Birley described Heritage Building as an especially exciting project because of the way overlapping struggles — housing justice as well as disability justice — are intrinsic to its story. “I’m excited to add a d/Deaf lens onto the housing crisis. Many landlords take advantage of us as d/Deaf people because of a lack of access to information.”
Yaffe discussed how Rot Hat’s intent to dissolve the barrier between artist and audience lends itself to a relaxed environment: one that softens sensory elements and allows patrons to come and go as they please.
“I wouldn’t describe myself as disabled,” said Yaffe, “or talk about my work as directly addressing disability communities, but I do talk a lot about bodily permission. I know that for myself, a relaxed performance is essential to my artistic goal.”
Jumping off Yaffe’s negotiation of labels, Bulmer pointed out that a crucial step in accessibility work is acknowledging the limitations of the term accessibility.
“I find the word a little misleading,” she said. “The word access, to me, suggests that something already exists: this process that builds ramps or finds descriptive words. That’s different from what Sara and Nate are talking about, which is imagining beyond the assumed — meaning the non-disabled people in the audience — and how that act of imagining informs what is being created. The idea of disability exists before the piece is made, and all throughout.”
The SummerWorks Performance Festival runs from August 6 to 16 at locations across Toronto. More information is available here. Visit the festival’s accessibility page for more information.
SummerWorks Performance Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
LEARN MORE
