PuSh in the Community
Amplifying connection between local and visiting artists.
The Unreliable Narrator: Writing in the Digital Age Masterclass (Belgium/Brazil)
A 4-day masterclass with Luanda Casella
For experienced writers and playwrights
“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story, they say. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.”
February 4, 2-6PM & February 5-7, 10AM-2PM
The Post at 750 | 110-750 Hamilton St., Vancouver
This program is free for selected applicants.
Application deadline December 8, 2025
Reckoning with the flourishing cult of story in our post-truth era, writer, performing artist, and theatre director Luanda Casella (Trouble Score) invites you to explore how our creative imagination has been hijacked in the twenty-first century—and how the timeless human desire for narrative has been weaponized by the storytelling machine.
In this four-day masterclass, you’ll investigate The Unreliable Narrator—a literary figure whose persuasive charm, distortion, and self-delusion illuminate the unstable nature of truth today. Beginning with its origins in textual irony and literary theory, you’ll trace how this character evolved from the “madman” and “pervert” to contemporary voices like the influencer, spin doctor, and marketeer.
Through discussion, research, and hands-on writing exercises, participants will explore deceptive discourse as both a literary technique and a tool for social persuasion. You’ll collect digital fragments, experiment with rhetorical manipulation, and craft short texts based on true, false, and fabricated facts. The course embraces a critical awareness of how storytelling governs perception—and what it means to write from within the confusion.
Presented with Playwrights Theatre Centre
How to Apply
Please complete this application form and include:
- A brief statement on why you wish to take part in The Unreliable Narrator and how you hope to benefit.
- An overview of your relevant professional experience and/or advanced-level training.
- Any access needs you would like to share (optional).
- For more information, contact joanna@playwrightstheatre.com.
About the Artist
Luanda Casella is a writer, performing artist, and theatre director from São Paulo, based in Ghent, Belgium. A resident artist at NTGent, her work is internationally acclaimed for its ingenious storytelling and incisive deconstruction of language.
Casella teaches at the drama department of the KASK Conservatory in Ghent and is a PhD candidate examining “deceptive discourse” in communication processes and “unreliable narrators” in classic and contemporary works of fiction. She has been a guest lecturer at leading institutions including DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), KABK (The Hague), P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance (Brussels), Toneelacademie Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, Cité Universitaire de Paris, and Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA).
Presented with
Drag & Devising Workshop with Wet Mess (UK)
For artists with any performance practice who are excited to explore experimental drag.
Feb 10 3–6PM
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | 149 W Hastings St., Vancouver
Price: $60/$80/$100
Enter the gloriously chaotic world of Wet Mess—the TESTO creator, sweet prince, alien baby, and DIY drag dream coach. In this playful devising workshop, you’ll lip-sync, costume, and clown your way toward new drag personas and stage creations. Explore how five-minute acts can grow into full-length fever dreams, mixing the trashy with the transcendent. Come ready to get weird, take risks, and see what strange, glorious version of yourself slips out of the seams.
Presented with Tara Cheyenne Performance
Supported by SFU
How to Register
Please complete this registration form and include:
- A bit about your practice.
- What draws you to this workshop.
- Any access needs you wish to share (optional).
About the Artist
Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs.
Presented with
Supported by
Remembering the Present: A Creation Laboratory with L’École Parallèle Imaginaire (France)
For experienced theatre artists with advanced-level training and/or professional experience. Pre-professional theatre students are also welcome to apply.
January 12, 9AM–5PM
Jan 13–16 & 19–22, 10AM–6PM
The Improv Centre | 1502 Duranleau St., Vancouver
This program is free for selected applicants.
Application deadline December 8, 2025
For more information, contact pushapplicationstic@theimprovcentre.ca.
Step into a nine-day creation laboratory with Rémi Fortin and Arthur Amard—members of L’École Parallèle Imaginaire (France) and co-creators of Le Beau Monde. Together, you’ll enter a transmission of process that merges performance and collective invention.
Drawing from the dramaturgy of Le Beau Monde—a speculative ritual in which future beings attempt to reconstruct the everyday customs of our time—you’ll use improvisation, collaborative writing, and embodied exploration to reinvent fragments of the original work and generate your own speculative ceremonies. What gestures, emotions, and social habits might future generations remember—or misremember—about us?
Guided by Fortin and Amard’s signature blend of intelligence, absurdity, and tenderness, you’ll experiment at the edge of documentary and fiction, building speculative ceremonies as new mythology of the present. Rather than transmitting a fixed form, the artists invite you to co-create an ecological and poetic model of how performance might travel—across borders, bodies, and time.
The intensive will culminate in a public studio showing.
Presented with The Improv Centre
How to Apply
Please complete this application form and include:
- An artistic response (short text or video) to a creative prompt imagining a future ritual of remembrance—details are outlined in the form.
- A brief overview of your relevant professional experience and/or advanced-level training.
- Any access needs you wish to share (optional).
About the Artist
Rémi Fortin and Arthur Amard are members of L’École Parallèle Imaginaire (France), an interdisciplinary collective that reimagines how performance, ritual, and imagination intersect.
A graduate of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Fortin approaches creation as both actor and instigator, developing works that merge walking, writing, and collective authorship into theatrical rituals of memory. His practice explores how performance can serve as a vessel for transmission—carrying gestures, stories, and emotions across time.
Amard, trained at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, moves fluidly between theatre, movement, and live music. A pianist and accordionist, he integrates composition and sound as dramaturgical forces within performance, crafting works that hover between concert, ceremony, and play.
Presented with
In Practice with Cherish Menzo & Jennifer Piasecki (The Netherlands)
For dance/movement artists.
Jan 24, 12–3PM
Q7 Studio at The Improv Centre | 1502 Duranleau St., Vancouver
Suggested Workshop Registration $23 // Sliding Scale Option $10-23
Workshop registrants will never be turned away for lack of funds. If a registration fee is financially inaccessible to you, we invite you to self-identify to request a scholarship, no questions asked. Please reach out to marco@newworks.ca to request a scholarship to attend the workshop.
Join international artists Cherish Menzo (Co-Artistic Director, GRIP; JEZEBEL) and Jennifer Piasecki (Production & Tour Management, GRIP) for a conversation on well-being and collaboration within artistic organizations. Drawing from their experiences working within a company led by four co-artistic directors, they will reflect on the relational practices that foster healthy and flexible working environments.
Rather than offering expert instruction, Cherish and Jennifer will share personal insights, working methods, and practices they’ve implemented to nurture care and balance across roles and relationships — from leadership to freelance collaborators.
Presented with New Works Dance
Supported by Fonds Podiumkunsten Performing Arts Fund NL
About In Practice
In Practice is a program for continued education, peer-to-peer exchange, and knowledge sharing for dance teachers and leaders.
Register NowAbout the Artist
Cherish Menzo (°1988, The Netherlands) is a choreographer and dancer, who works from Brussels and Amsterdam.
For her artistic work, she is interested in the transformation of the body on stage and in the “embodiment” of different physical images. Implementing distortion, decay, and dissonance, Cherish attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. Glitching the ‘’common’’ lexical, the lexical of the speaking being, she seeks the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous to give shape to – and materialize speculative forms and fictions.
Cherish is currently touring with FRANK, in continuation of JEZEBEL and D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER.
Jennifer Piasecki (Ghent) has been the Production & Tour Manager at GRIP since February 2023, bringing extensive experience in production management across film, television, and dance. Beyond her professional work, she is an enthusiastic dance teacher and co-organizer of HipHopUnite Belgium. At GRIP—a company led by four co-artistic directors—Jennifer has developed a strong focus on well-being, recently completing a course on the subject. She now actively applies these insights within a working group dedicated to fostering people-centered practices and well-being at GRIP, and fulfills the role of internal confidential advisor for the company.
Presented with
Presented with
The Unreliable Narrator: Artist Talk by Luanda Casella (Belgium/Brazil)
For general public and arts professionals
February 5, 5-7PM
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Free
Reckoning with the cult of story in our post-truth era, Luanda Casella (Trouble Score)—writer, performing artist, and master of narrative subversion—examines how the timeless human desire for storytelling has been hijacked by the machinery of persuasion. In this lecture, she introduces her artistic practice and research into The Unreliable Narrator, revealing how deceptive discourse and irony operate across literature, performance, and digital culture to both manipulate and awaken critical thought.
Presented with Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre
Register for the artist talkAbout the Artist
Luanda Casella is a writer, performing artist, and theatre director from São Paulo, based in Ghent, Belgium. A resident artist at NTGent, her work is internationally acclaimed for its ingenious storytelling and incisive deconstruction of language.
Casella teaches at the drama department of the KASK Conservatory in Ghent and is a PhD candidate examining “deceptive discourse” in communication processes and “unreliable narrators” in classic and contemporary works of fiction. She has been a guest lecturer at leading institutions including DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), KABK (The Hague), P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance (Brussels), Toneelacademie Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, Cité Universitaire de Paris, and Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA).
Presented with
In Dialogue
PuSh Festival invites emerging artists and arts critics aged 25-35 to join In Dialogue—a week-long intensive of shared viewing, conversation, and critical exchange during the 2026 Festival.
Over seven days, a cohort of 10–12 participants will attend PuSh Festival performances together, engage in discussions facilitated by established theatre makers and arts academics, and attend artist talk backs. The program cultivates space for deep inquiry into contemporary creation—its urgencies, dramaturgies, and evolving forms.
Applications open October 23–December 3, 2025
Program dates: February 2–8, 2026
Who should apply:
Artists and critics ready to watch, reflect, and speak in dialogue. You might be a director, choreographer, playwright, performer, designer, arts writer, or researcher—anyone developing a practice within the live arts who seeks rigorous, reciprocal exchange.
What to expect:
- 6–8 hours daily (afternoons and evenings) immersed in conversation and performances
- Seven days of shared viewing and rigorous critical exchange
- Encounters with artists from the PuSh 2026 lineup
- A cohort of peers engaged in contemporary performance and cultural dialogue
Participation is free of charge and includes complimentary tickets to approximately eight performances and events.
Food and transportation are self-organized.
Applications close December 3, 2025.
We prioritize participation from IBPOC artists and from those based across Greater Vancouver, beyond the City of Vancouver.
Application Requirements:
Applicants must submit either a one-page cover letter or a three-minute video addressing:
- An overview of relevant professional experience
- Up to three questions guiding their current practice
- Why they wish to take part in In Dialogue and how they hope to benefit
- Applicant’s age (participants must be 25–35)
Please also include a Curriculum Vitae.
Send your application to youth@pushfestival.ca with Subject Line: In Dialogue Application
If you have any questions or require access support during the application process, please contact us at youth@pushfestival.ca.
To find out more about these opportunities, contact community@pushfestival.ca, and to discover more workshops and events Centering Latin American artistic expression, visit our Encuentro page.