DanceWorks presents Sweet Ephemera, a double bill running from June 18 to 20,2026 at The Theatre Centre in Toronto. This bill showcases two new works by emerging Toronto artists exploring identity, faith, queerness, and the parts of ourselves we’re taught to hide.

Sweet Ephemera asks what it means to carry culture, identity, and grief in the body, and what happens when we allow others to witness that weight. Across two works, performers use food, ritual, improvisation, and sensory experience to move between tenderness and release, memory and mourning, control and care.

Eilish Shin-Culhane’s Peel Me is an experimental contemporary dance work that asks audiences to consider what lies beneath the surface. Told through a series of vivid vignettes that use the image of citrus being peeled open as a way into queerness, vulnerability, and self-discovery. Performers eat and destroy grapefruits and fortune cookies, using mess and sensation as a path to emotional release.

Miggy Esteban’s pahinga ka muna begins with the rosary, holding onto the comfort of growing up in a Filipino Catholic community while confronting the pain of queer unbelonging within that same space. It’s an improvisational ritual of mourning and rest rooted in Filipino diasporic experience, where no two evenings are alike. It’s an improvisational ritual of mourning and rest rooted in Filipinx diasporic experience, disability, crip, and mad arts practice of access. Weaving together poetic audio description, movement, and memory, the work invites audiences into an evolving performance of care, where no two evenings are alike.

Together, the pieces speak to something very immediate: how family, culture, religion, memory, and identity live in the body. It’s a deeply personal, Toronto-rooted conversation about coming into yourself, and it feels especially resonant right now. Exploring queer intimacy, cultural memory, and diasporic experience.

SHOW INFORMATION:

Dates: June 18 to 20 at 8:00 pm

Venue: The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St W, Toronto, ON

Tickets: $18 to $40

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist with a focus on travel, lifestyle, entertainment and hospitality. He has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He enjoys discovering delicious eats, tasting spirited treats, and being mesmerized by musical beats.