The 21st PuSh International Festival will return to Vancouver venues from January 22 to February 8, 2026, bringing two and a half weeks of creative theatrical works by local and Canadian artists along with Indigenous creators and international collaborators. For more than two decades, PuSh has been a highlight of the city’s winter Arts scene, bringing bold, audacious performances to audiences.
“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 remapping’s 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.”
As it has for over two decades, the 2026 PuSh Festival pushes the bounds of disciplines bringing together presentations in theatre, dance, multimedia, music, and film. At the program launch party Artistic Director Gabrielle Martin and Managing Director Annie Clarke presented the Festival’s lineup of 23 works dedicated to inspired risk-taking and dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration from 13 countries—featuring 6 world premieres, 4 Canadian debuts, 5 Western Canadian premieres and 4 Vancouver premieres. In addition to a strong Canadian presence, PuSh welcomes artists from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Palestine, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. PuSh’s commitment to diversity shines a light on 14 shows created by people of colour; 6 shows by Indigenous creators; and 5 shows by 2SLGBTQIA+ artists.
Taking to The Birdcage stage at the launch party was 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.
The Festival’s Opening and Closing will also be celebrated at The Birdhouse, with an Opening Party event on Friday, January 23, featuring Palestinian DJ and composer Khalil Albatran with French composer Marie Delprat transforming the dance floor with semi-modular synths and live-manipulated vocals. Vancouver’s Joshua Ongcol and company ignite the room with spontaneous, high-energy cyphers born from clubs, jams, and joy.
Music on Main, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts present Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth: Saputjiji at the Chan Centre on February 5 at 8 pm.
From Polaris Prize and Juno Award–winning singer Tanya Tagaq comes this performance that expands on the elemental and poetic world of her beloved book Split Tooth. Neither adaptation nor concert, Split Tooth: Saputjiji is a new language of performance—gathering Inuit throat singers, musicians, and performers within a staged environment that blurs music and memory, landscape and breath.
Tagaq’s voice, both singular and collective, channels the ancestral and the futuristic, invoking presences that move between worlds. Within this living sonic environment, distinctions between music, ritual, and theatre dissolve. Under the direction of Kaneza Schaal, the result is an expansive act of transformation—a conversation with the future through mythic realism.
PuSh is not just about the performances—it is also a creative hub for dialogue, mentorship, and professional development. The PuSh 2026 Industry Series brings together 240+ global performing arts professionals for panels, labs, and sector-exchanges from January 27 to February 1.
New this year, In Dialogue, program for emerging artists and arts critics ages 25–35, is a free intensive inviting deep inquiry into contemporary performance. Over seven days, participants will attend Festival performances together, join discussions with leading theatre makers and scholars, and take part in post-show conversations with Festival artists.
The new series Encuentro, in partnership with Latincouver and the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre, is a community-centred initiative (meaning “gathering” in Spanish and Portuguese) fostering Latin American cultural appreciation and exchange at PuSh. Encuentro aims to build connections between PuSh’s visiting artists and Vancouver’s Latin American communities, and to amplify Latin American perspectives within the Canadian cultural landscape.
Truly a city-wide festival, PuSh continues to partner with organizations including The Cultch, New Works, Music on Main, Touchstone Theatre, Indian Summer Festival, frank theatre co., Playwrights Theatre Centre, Here & Now (UK), Van Vogue Jam, The Dance Centre, SFU, Vancouver Civic Theatres, Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre, and the Granville Island Theatre District. Expanding its connections this year, with new partnerships with the Chinese Canadian Museum, LIVE Biennale, and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.
February 7, the Festival’s closing weekend at The Birdcage brings The Motha’ Kiki Ball by BlackOut Collective, co-presented by PuSh and Van Vogue Jam, a Black History Month spectacular celebrating the power that gives life to cultures and movements. Followed by a wrap up Closing Party celebrating the weeks of entertainment into the night.