The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver offers a diverse lineup of performances, inviting audiences into a world of narrative explorations and artistic expressions. From the rich storytelling of 'Géométrie de vies' to the imaginative realms of 'Seeing Double // K Body And Mind,' this festival showcases the vibrancy and innovation in contemporary performing arts. Each event challenges perceptions, celebrates cultural heritage, and brings unique artistic visions to life, making the festival a must-attend for art enthusiasts.

Exploring Artistic Narratives and New Realities at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

Under a charged nightclub haze, two performers move with electric intimacy, flirting, teasing, shape-shifting. Immersed in the bittersweet fragrance of oranges, OUT is a defiant challenge to the status quo that bravely carves out a new kind of space, reclaiming and celebrating our queer future.

Performance Works

Inner Sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy through dance, creating a dynamic dialogue between traditions preserved across generations. This cross-pollination bridges Taiwan’s heritage, grounded in reverence and ritual, with Europe’s tapestry of religious practices, carving an artistic approach that challenges colonial narratives and enriches contemporary explorations of spirituality.

Inner Sublimity

Vancouver Art Gallery

Transpofagic Manifesto is a courageous and thought-provoking work that challenges commonly-held views around gender diversity. Renata Carvalho, a Brazilian human rights activist, reclaims the term “travesti” to describe a distinct transfeminine identity with a history of marginalization and resilience in Latin America. Embracing her travesti identity, she invites the public to behold her, stripped of gender-enforcing constraints, and engage in a conversation on how harmful perceptions of trans people are constructed and reproduced.

Transpofagic Manifesto

Waterfront Theatre

In a world teetering on the edge, a family gathers for a seemingly ordinary Sunday. Yet little by little, everything around them crumbles under the devastating effects of natural disasters. Regardless, they cling to their day-to-day routines, convinced that an imminent collapse is only a distant possibility. Meanwhile, three wildlife reporters race against time to document Earth’s last remaining species on the brink of extinction, hoping to preserve a trace of the world slipping away before their eyes.

Dimanche

Vancouver Playhouse

PuSh Festival and Small Stage are teaming up to bring back this critically acclaimed and wildly popular Vancouver institution—and this time, it’s bolder and braver than ever. With a spotlight on the power of intersectional and intergenerational performers, the lineup explores a wide range of dance practices, showcasing a vibrant mix of eclectic works by visionary local, national and international artists.

Dances for a Small Stage

Please Beverage Co

Choreographer Marie Chouinard presents two unorthodox performances that mark pivotal moments in her trailblazing career, both inspired by iconic Ballets Russes masterpieces by Vaslav Nijinsky. The original works were revolutionary for their departure from classical ballet, and Chouinard extends their avant-garde impact, reimagining them through her contemporary lens and transforming each into a viscerally provocative experience.

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring

Hub International Theatre

On February 2, the cosmic forces of Van Vogue Jam and PuSh Festival converge for a showdown of galactic proportions: Dune Wars Kiki Ball. Hosted by the Kiki Legendary Overall Mother Posh Gvasalia, this astro-glam extravaganza celebrates the creativity and resilience of the QTBIPOC community through Ballroom—a culture founded by Black, Latinx, Queer and Trans folk in NYC, Harlem in the 60’s. The most fab children of Vancouver’s Ballroom scene will compete for cash prizes—and interstellar supremacy—across categories where space-age vogue, fashion and attitude bring the planets of Arrakis and Tatooine into alignment.

Dune Wars Kiki Ball

The Birdhouse

SEEING DOUBLE is an homage to spooky late-night double features, a cerebral marathon that keeps the audience on edge through vivid surround sound and optical illusion. These two performances are strange sisters that sneak pulpy speculative fiction aesthetics into uncharted conceptual territories.

Seeing Double // K Body And Mind

The Dance Center

Step into a surreal, frozen otherworld where time stands still and the bonds of friendship transcend the mortal realm. De glace (From Ice) breathes life into a Nordic literary gem that pierces us with a story of two young girls bound by an unbreakable connection.

De glace (From Ice)

Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre

Visceral, transgressive and magnetic, BOGOTÁ constructs a brutalist landscape out of choreography inspired by Colombia’s political and spiritual heritage. With striking intensity, nine performers chronicle transformations between chaos and rebirth, incarnating the tensions of ever-unfolding and turbulent histories.

Bogotá

In a surprising fusion of theatre and gastronomy, this adaptation of A Taste of Empire reimagines Jovanni Sy’s acclaimed play about the effects of global imperialism on how we produce, prepare and consume food. Presented in Tagalog with English surtitles, the performance guides audiences across the layered history of Philippine cultural heritage through a live cooking demonstration.

Lasa Ng Imperyo (A Taste of Empire)

The Nest

Complete darkness, a vast sea, 8kms, the distance many undertake in search of asylum in Europe. SWIM is an immersive audio-haptic experience that imagines the physical, mental and spiritual challenges of this treacherous passage as it meditates upon the emotional toll of displacement. Harnessing cutting-edge technologies to simulate audio and tactile sensations, the audience experiences much of the piece in darkness plunged into immersive audio, haptic technology and tactile sensorium.

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Swim

The Cultch

What are the blueprints of sexual desire and fantasy? In this unapologetic investigation of power dynamics and identity, Clayton Lee invites the audience to confront that very question through an intimate and unfiltered reckoning of his sexual and romantic history. With deadpan humour and mischievous wit, Lee explores his childhood obsession with the professional wrestler Bill Goldberg and its lasting impact on him.

The Goldberg Variations

Club PuSh is teaming up once again with QT Cabaret on Wednesday, January 29th! This annual party, curated by the frank theatre’s artistic director Fay Nass, will be held at the iconic Fox Cabaret—once a notorious adult cinema, now a hub for independent culture and nightlife. Join us for a spellbinding evening celebrating the vibrant creativity of 2SLGBTQIA+ artists through an unforgettable mix of electrifying dance, outrageous drag and heart-thumping music.

Club PuSh

Bailey by StreetSide

Hermit crabs don’t have shells. Instead they improvise homes from objects that catch their eye, then migrate to new and more hospitable residences as they outgrow their makeshift dwellings. Drawing inspiration from the resourceful adaptability of these enigmatic creatures, Habitat presents a hypnotic meditation on resettlement and the search for home.

Habitat

Gabriel Dharmoo is an innovative music composer and vocalist who thrives on experimentation. Bijuriya, his drag persona, channels the vibrancy of South Asian culture to touch the hearts of fellow brown queers. Together, Gabriel and Bijuriya embody different facets of the same individual, engaging in an interplay of duality that delves into the hybrid, multifaceted layers that coexist within their identity.

Bijuriya

Annex Vancouver

Bathed in luminescence that evokes the glowing urban nightscape of a distant and imagined Saigon, Châu Kim-Sanh beckons the senses through fluorescent haze to her ancestral land.

Bleu Néon

Left of Main

Géométrie de vies (The Geometry of Lives) is a vibrant narrative poem brought to life through theatre, song and dance. Its lyrics link two young lives on a journey across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a land fertile with hopes and dreams.

Géométrie de vies (Geometry of Lives)

What happens when a nation’s artistic spirit is undermined by the weight of Western influence? This question drives Jaha Koo’s visionary documentary theatre performance, which examines how the suppression of local culture under Western assimilation has shaped Korean theatre—and by extension the national identity of South Korea.

The History of Korean Western Theatre

This choreographic work unfolds across a desolate terrain, scattered with assemblages of industrial debris and organic matter, where the stage becomes a space of hybridization, a threshold between inner landscapes and external realities. Suspended in this liminal space, the performers engage with their sculptural surroundings in fleeting moments of playfulness, resignation, ecstasy and abandonment, forming a corporeal topography that collapses the boundary between dancer and environment.

PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

8 - 9 Feb, 2025

OUT

7 - 9 Feb, 2025

Inner Sublimity

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PuSh International Performing Arts Festival