Creative Connector Updated on Sep 29, 2026 3 min read

Hello Sunshine!

Tour-ready project by Sara Porter.

Keywords: dance, music, poetry, solo show, theatre

Hello Sunshine! is a one-woman multidisciplinary absurdist performance by Sara Porter about her experience living with Polymorphous Light Eruption / PMLE — acute sun allergy — and the social, personal, and logistical challenges of negotiating life with invisible disability. The show slips between clown and memoir, contemporary dance and poetry, interactive lighting, surprising costume changes, and original songs sung on a yellow ukelele, set against a backdrop of ubiquitous pop songs about sunshine.

While living in Scotland, at the age of 27, Sara was diagnosed with PMLE, an autoimmune condition that makes her acutely reactive to UV radiation (daylight). Sara developed the show through travelling back to the dermatology clinic in rainy Scotland, and a creative residency in the 24-hour darkness of Northern Norway in winter. Hello Sunshine! emerged as an account of inventive living and a complex and vulnerable account of exposure and invisibility.

Created with Blind artist Alex Bulmer as Disability Dramaturg, Hello Sunshine! is designed to be accessible to Blind audiences, through prepared audio description and a touch tour of the set.

Created with support by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, DAVVI Centre for the Performing Arts, The Registry Theatre Residency Program (Kitchener), the Lindy Green Family Foundation, and the KM Hunter Foundation. The show was presented as part of SummerWorks’ Accessibility and Community Wellness Program, generously funded by Aubrey & Marla Dan Foundation.

About the Artists

Celebrated for her playful, irreverent and virtuosic performance, Sara Porter premiered Hello Sunshine! - the third of her Memoir and Movement solos - at 2026 SummerWorks Performance Festival.

Sara Porter is a multidisciplinary queer and disabled performer, choreographer, vocalist, writer and educator with a distinctive voice and a broad palette. Celebrated for her wit and absurdity, Sara’s performances propose the queer and disabled body as a site for personal reflection and play. Over a 30-year career, Sara has created over 25 works and performed across Canada, in the US, UK, and Europe. Her signature one-woman show, Sara does a Solo, toured Canada and the US for three years.

In 2019, Sara received a Chalmers Fellowship to research performance at the intersection of memoir and movement and subsequent works – Getting to Know Your Fruit, L-E-A-K, This is my Math Dance, and Bad Poetry: Live in [your town]! – emerged as poetic and documentary storytelling mixed with clown and memoir. Sara was in residency in Northern Norway to develop Hello Sunshine!, a solo about living with PMLE (acute sun allergy).

Sara Porter Productions was founded in 2020 to capture the growing momentum in her work. Sara teaches workshops in Memoir & Movement, TADA! (How to talk + dance at the same time) and B Ballet FAB (Basic Ballet for all Bodies). Sara is also an author, dance writer, curriculum developer, and member of Toronto’s Intergalactic Arts Collective Studio.