Queering the PuSh Festival 2026
Every January, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival settles into Vancouver and turns the coldest stretch of winter into a stretch of curiosity. The 2026 edition brings together artists who push at form and feeling, creating work that doesn’t sit still and doesn’t play it safe. Over two and a half weeks, the Festival becomes a meeting place for theatre, dance, music, multimedia, and the kinds of hybrid performances that ignore labels entirely.
For the queer and 2SLGBTQiA+ communities, PuSh remains a space where bodies, identities, and histories can show up without translation. This year’s programming reaches across continents and lineages, pulling in stories shaped by Black femininity, muxheidad, drag, ecofeminism, Andean memory, and a punk-spirited desire to laugh through the chaos. Each piece invites audiences to sit with complexity, question what performance can hold, and enjoy the surprise of artists who follow their own logic.
The 2026 Festival offers 25 presentations across the city, all carrying the spark that makes PuSh feel less like a schedule and more like an encounter. What follows is a look at just some of the work waiting in the wings.
JEZEBEL
Cherish Menzo / Frascati Producties (The Netherlands / Belgium)
DANCE
Thurs Jan 22, Fri Jan 23 @ 8PM | Scotiabank Dance Centre
Post-show Talkback: Jan 23
Western Canadian premiere
Presented with new works DANCE
Through physical performance, hip hop visual language, and the slowed, distorted flow of chopped-and-screwed sound, JEZEBEL reclaims the hyper-sexualized “video vixen” of hip hop’s golden age. Once framed through a male gaze that fetishized and vilified Black femininity, she now stretches the image until its artifice becomes her authorship. What emerges is a portrait of a woman both muse and maker—unapologetic and self-possessed.
Bardaje
Lukas Avendaño (Mexico)
THEATRE, INTERDISCIPLINARY
Feb 2, 3 @ 8PM | The Roundhouse
Post-show talkback: Feb 2
Presented with Latincouver
Part live art and part embodied meditation, Bardaje moves with feathers, ash, metallic paper, and ancestral ayoyotes to explore muxheidad—a third gender beyond binaries. Grounded in memory and matrilineality, this sensorial experience blurs body and spirit, inviting audiences into a space of reflection, presence, and quiet defiance.
La utopia de la mariposa
José Miguel Jaime Crespo (Mexico) / TIERRA – Fana Adjani (Mexico)
FILM (FREE WITH TICKETS TO BARDAJE)
Feb 2, Feb 3 @ 6:30PM | The Roundhouse
Presented with Latincouver
Performance, politics, and cinema converge in two visionary films featuring Lukas Avendaño. La utopía de la mariposa channels personal grief into public testimony, where art becomes a demand for justice. Tierra, directed by Fana Adjani, turns dance and ecofeminism into mythic becoming. Each film blurs the line between document and dream, revealing art as both resistance and renewal.
SLUGS
Creepy Boys / So.Glad Arts (Canada)
MULTIMEDIA, COMEDY
Jan 29-Jan 31 @ 9PM | NEST
Post-show talkback: Jan 29
Vancouver premiere
From the award-winning performance/comedy duo Creepy Boys comes SLUGS: a techno-punk concert, clown show and basement puppet nightmare about trying to have a good time while the world burns. Fusing DIY absurdity with electronic comedy songs and trash puppetry, this “brilliantly smart and beautifully stupid” hit from Edinburgh spirals from chaos into catharsis. For tonight, we are free.
TESTO
Wet Mess (UK)
THEATRE, DRAG, MULTIMEDIA
Feb 7 @ 8PM, Feb 8 @ 2PM | Performance Works
Post-show Talkback: Feb 8
Western Canadian premiere
Presented with Here + Now and the frank theatre co.
In TESTO, Wet Mess dives headfirst into the gloriously messy edges of drag, testosterone, and transition. It's a chaotic celebration of bodies in flux—where the magical hides in the mundane and made-up fantasies become real. Expect dykey desires, moustache meals, and a choreography of guttural sexuality that turns everyday life inside out.
The Motha' Kiki Ball
BlackOUT Collective (Canada)
MUSIC, DANCE
Feb 7 @5PM | The Birdhouse
From vogue to runway, The Motha’ Kiki Ball crowns motherhood as the origin story, legacy, and creative force behind Ballroom. Black Out, a collective centering Blackness in the local Kiki scene, leads this year’s winter ball co-presented by PuSh and Van Vogue Jam. This Black History Month spectacular celebrates the power that gives life to cultures and movements. Expect looks that radiate iconic energy and a runway filled with matriarch moments.
Wayqeycuna
Tiziano Cruz (Argentina)
THEATRE
Feb 6 @ 7:30PM, Feb 7 @ 2PM | The Roundhouse
Post-show Talkback: Feb 6
Vancouver premiere
Presented with Latincouver
Like a quipu—the intricate system of knotted cords used by Andean peoples to record memory and knowledge—Wayqeycuna traces Argentinean artist Tiziano Cruz’s path back to his childhood in the Andean north. Through a poetic layering of testimony, ritual, and performance, this final work in his trilogy unfolds as an act of return and repair—a lament for what has been taken, and a celebration of what persists.