At the 2026 Luminato Festival, performance gets up close and personal
iPhoto caption: Members of the company of 'Katma.' Photo by Anna Kucera.
The Luminato Festival has officially entered its 20s — and it’s ready to party.
For its 20th anniversary edition this June, the festival’s programmers have curated a diverse lineup of contemporary performance centred around the theme of play. Art spills out of the theatre and into the bar, the street, and the club. Installations like Kurt Perschke’s Giant Red Ball — exactly what it says on the tin — and Liz West’s Anthems to Colour create provocations in public space. A livestream of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) and a circus spectacle featuring a real fire truck (by Bazar Creátion) bring a dose of whimsy to Sankofa Square.
And when it comes to the festival’s theatre and dance programming, multiple shows feature artists getting up close and personal with spectators.
“I’ll be in, amongst, and climbing around and over the audience,” said theatre artist Justin Miller in a phone interview. As his alter ego, drag queen Pearle Harbour, Miller welcomes audiences into a hidden bar in the Fairmont Royal York hotel, with a world-premiere cabaret for an audience of 25.
“Pearle Harbour Walks into a Bar is a dark narrative cabaret that’s woven around drinking songs,” Miller described. The show’s music director is Greg Morrison, who won a Tony Award in 2006 for co-writing The Drowsy Chaperone, and who scored Miller’s 2025 short film Bunker Time. The pair have assembled a library of drinking songs ranging from “Auld Lang Syne” to Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” as a jumping-off point to explore different kinds of compulsions in contemporary life.
“I was thinking about my own addictive tendencies, namely the fact that I’m absolutely attached to my phone as another appendage,” said Miller. “We don’t think about unhealthy relationships with our devices in the same way that we think about a drinking problem. In this show, Pearle Harbour bursts into a bar, half-drunk, and she’s desperately looking for an outlet to charge her phone. Instead of finding an outlet, she finds the audience — and the audience becomes her outlet.”
Luminato approached Miller about activating the bar at the Fairmont. “When I’m writing a show, one tiny piece is always a catalyst,” he said. “In this case, it was the location: this weird little preserved-in-amber space hidden in this glamorous labyrinth.”
Katma, conceived and directed by Sudanese-Australian dance artist Azzam Mohamed, was likewise inspired by a space of sorts — in this case, the concept of a crowded dancefloor. The piece celebrates street and club styles of dance, and pays tribute to the party scenes that birthed them. Olivia Ansell, Luminato’s current artistic director, previously programmed Katma’s world premiere at Australia’s Sydney Festival, which she led from 2022 to 2025. For the Toronto run, seven dancers, including Mohammed, will turn the Ada Slaight Hall at Daniels Spectrum into a club.
“Katma is a slang term that we use back home in Sudan,” Mohamed explained in a video call. “The word originally means ‘suffocation.’ If a party’s reached the point where everyone’s sweating and moving, katma means, ‘We’re at the peak of the party.’”
As in Miller’s piece, the divide between spectator and performer is paper-thin, with everyone together on the dance floor.
“It would be so weird for people to be sitting two feet away, watching other people have a good time,” said Mohamed. “In the party environment, there’s nothing between me and you. You’re so close to me that I can’t fake it. You can see me tired, you can see me breathing heavily. Sometimes we build a fourth wall where you have to watch [the dancers], and then sometimes we break out of that and it becomes a regular jam: people can actually engage, talk, and dance with us.” Sound engineer and DJ Jack Prest will control Katma’s house music soundscape live, extending or condensing moments based on audiences’ live reactions. Woven into the soundscape are samples from interviews that Mohamed conducted with an international range of prominent dance artists: another angle on the show’s message of community.
Pearle Harbour Walks into a Bar and Katma aren’t the only Luminato dance or theatre offerings in which music plays a prominent role. In Heartbreak Hotel, by the New Zealand-based company EBKM, performer Karin McCracken works a synth board and performs reinterpretations of classic break-up ballads, as she portrays a woman attempting to move on after the end of a six-year relationship. And in Theatre of Dreams, the U.K.-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter blends dance with an electronic soundscape, conjuring images that reference the unconscious mind. As with Katma and Pearle Harbour, the fourth wall in these shows is semi-opaque at most. McCracken’s narrator alternates direct-address monologues with dialogue scenes opposite castmate Simon Leary. At one point, Theatre of Dreams’ dancers invite spectators to join them for a brief salsa.
Both Miller and Mohamed spoke about their Luminato productions as milestones in their respective practices, and opportunities to take stock.
“A huge goal for me has been to write in a way fundamentally different from any other show I’ve done,” Miller shared. “It’s still rooted in what you know and love about Pearle, but the rhythm has completely changed. It’s the most rapid, contemporary, and new that she’s ever been.”
Mohamed, for his part, spoke about Katma as an homage to the people and parties that shaped him. He has a background in engineering, and never studied dance in a formal institution. “My whole journey started through parties and dance battles,” he said. Katma’s team includes past teachers and collaborators, as well members of Mohamed’s dance crew, Riddim Nation.
“It’s the individuals that make the party… The piece is a translation of seven [dancers’] experiences,” said Mohammed. “And then [there’s also] the collective experience. When we can represent ourselves and be fully ourselves, that’s when the community becomes strong.”
The 2026 Luminato Festival runs from June 3 to 28. More information is available here.
Luminato Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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