PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is excited to announce the 2026 Festival will return to Vancouver from January 22 to February 8, 2026. For two and a half weeks across Vancouver, PuSh Festival invites audiences to discover creative theatrical works by local and Canadian artists alongside international collaborators and Indigenous creators. For more than two decades, PuSh has been the city’s midwinter anchor—a place where live art is celebrated, where risk is rewarded, and where Vancouver audiences engage with bold, audacious performances.

The 2026 PuSh Festival will continue to defy the bounds of disciplines, bringing together theatre, dance, multimedia performance, music, installation, and film. Rooted in PuSh’s artistic vision to animate culture and accelerate social change through performance, the Festival will present works that ask big questions, unsettle expectations, and create space for emotional resonance.

The 2026 PuSh Festival features 23 presentations in theatre, dance, multimedia, music, and film. Opening and Closing weekends will be celebrated at the Birdhouse, with an Opening Party event on Friday, January 23, and The Motha’ Kiki Ball by BlackOut Collective, co-produced by PuSh and Van Vogue Jam on Saturday, February 7.

Tickets for the 2026 Festival go on sale Thursday, November 20, 2025.

“The 2025 PuSh Festival is an invitation to the culturally fearless—to those ready to step into fresh futurities and the uncharted possibilities of live performance,” says Gabrielle Martin, Artistic Director of PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. “Across the program, artists prototype new ways of knowing and being in real time—through Indigenous cosmologies of deep time, feminist remappings of the gaze, AI-age grief rituals, and magic-realist reckonings where myth and memory blur. This is urgent work: performances as laboratories for how we might live and relate differently—where imagination is not escape, but infrastructure for the future.”

The Festival lineup is dedicated to inspired risk-taking and dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration with visionary works from 13 countries—including 6 world premieres, North American premiere, 4 Canadian debuts, 5 Western Canadian premieres and 4 Vancouver premieres. In addition to a strong Canadian presence with 11 presentations, PuSh’s 2026 international projects include works by artists from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Palestine, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. PuSh’s commitment to diversity continues with 14 shows created by people of colour; 6 shows by Indigenous creators; and 5 shows by 2SLGBTQIA+ artists.

The full program will be announced at PuSh’s 2026 Program Launch Party, open to the public, at the Birdhouse (44 W 4th Ave in Vancouver) on Wednesday, November 19 from 5-8pm. The launch will feature previews of each 2026 presentation, plus a live performance excerpt from Simran Sachar and Justine A. Chambers’ Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai, which premiered in July in an Indian Summer Festival-PuSh Festival co-presentation. RSVPs to the launch event are open until November 14.