A Festival for the Culturally Fearless
November 19, 2025
By Gabrielle Martin, Artistic Director
The 2026 PuSh Festival is an invitation to the culturally fearless—to those ready to step into fresh futurities and the expansive possibilities of live performance. In a time when dominant ways of knowing and being are collapsing into the polycrisis they have created, the artists gathered here embody ancestral and emergent ways of living, understanding, relating, and dreaming.
A central theme of diffracted and layered temporalities—geological, ancestral, and speculative—frames the program. Remember that time we met in the future?, Le Beau Monde, askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ, 2021, Khalil Khalil, Split Tooth: Saputjiji, Everything Has Disappeared, Catching Up to the Future of Our Past, Trouble Score, and Orpheus inhabit the space between myth and memory; trace descent as a route to renewal; reconstruct our present from the future; move through time as deep as the land; unfold toward futures still forming; and explore the confluence of potentiality and remembrance.
The Festival’s performances also propose ways of living otherwise. Kiuryaq, WAIL, TESTO, Bardaje, SKIN, SLUGS, The Motha’ Kiki Ball, The Brutal Joy, Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory, and Wayqeycuna offer relational aesthetics and practices of cultural kinship that invite us to transform how we gather, connect, and express. They propose counter ontologies through Northern cosmologies, multi-sensory meditations, messy transitions, muxheidad, liquid states, feverdreaming, Black living, karaoke, and breaking bread.
JEZEBEL, Kamwe Kamwe, and Eight Short Compositions from the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience prototype alternate epistemologies—ways of knowing grounded in the intelligence of the body. Through reclaiming the image of Black femininity, reshaping the conditions of witnessing and dancing as testimony, the artists behind these works offer affective archives where emotion and embodiment emerge as critical forms of knowledge and resistance.
From techno-punk clown puppet mashups to speculative rituals, and through works of intimate witness and collective catharsis, performances in this year’s PuSh merge into new harmonies of body, thought, and form. They gesture toward brighter, stranger mythologies—where imagination is not escape, but the infrastructure for what comes next.