PuSh in the Community

A 3-day movement training with Rakesh Sukesh

January 19 // 21 // 23, 10–11:30AM

Scotiabank Dance Centre | 677 Davie St
Drop-in participation welcome—attend one, two, or all three sessions.

Join Training Society of Vancouver, in partnership with The Dance Centre and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, for a movement training with Rakesh Sukesh—visiting Artist-in-Residence at PuSh 2026.

This TSV Special Delivery provides professional and pre-professional dance technique training for dancers, movers, performers, and people with ongoing embodied and physical practices.

TURTILING

Inspired by turtles—who navigate the Earth using its magnetic field and return home with precision—Turtiling supports participants in cultivating an inner compass through breath, protection, adaptability, and return.

Grounded in human traits—breath, movement, emotion, thought, intention, and environment—Turtiling creates a safe, exploratory space to engage both strength and vulnerability. Drawing on yogic philosophy, principles of Kalaripayattu, improvisation, and contemporary dance, the practice encourages playful exploration while developing resilience, presence, and individual movement identity.

Through reflection, embodied experience, and expressive action, participants cultivate clarity, creativity, confidence, and a deeper understanding of their internal and external worlds—fostering grounded, resilient, and deeply expressive performance practices.

Register Now

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PuSh Residency Showing

Participants and the wider community are also invited to attend Rakesh Sukesh’s PuSh residency showing of Invisibles on January 26.
Attendance at the classes is not required to attend the showing, and vice versa.

Learn More

About the Artist

Rakesh Sukesh is a performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer whose practice bridges the cultural and artistic worlds of Bharat (India) and Belgium. Rooted in yogic philosophy, his training includes study at the Shivananda Yoga Centre and expanded exploration of Kalaripayattu and contemporary dance with Jayachandran Palazy, Dil Sagar, Katie Duck, and David Zambrano.

His choreographic works include A Dream of Silence, YATRA, Borderland, and May Us Bless the I. His most recent creation, because I love the diversity (this micro-attitude we all have it)—commissioned by the PuSh Festival—has been touring internationally since 2024, with performances across the USA, UK, Hong Kong, and Europe continuing through 2025–2026.

Over the past 15 years, Sukesh has developed the globally recognised Turtiling Method, taught worldwide at major institutions. As a producer, he co-leads Sanskar Festivals and co-curates Dance on Screen in Switzerland.

January 22 | 5–6 PM

The Improv Centre | 1502 Duranleau St., Vancouver

Free—all are welcome, no RSVP required

This free public showing emerges from a nine-day creation laboratory led by Rémi Fortin and Arthur Amard, co-creators of Le Beau Monde (Jan 24-25).

Working with a group of local artists, Fortin and Amard share a process rooted in collective invention, speculative dramaturgy, and embodied research. Drawing from the world of Le Beau Monde—a ritualistic fiction in which future beings attempt to reconstruct the everyday customs of our time—the lab explores how gestures, emotions, and social habits might be remembered, transformed, or misinterpreted across generations.

Rather than presenting a finished work, this intimate studio showing offers a glimpse into artistic work-in-process at the intersection of documentary and imagination—where fragments, experiments, and speculative ceremonies are shared live with the public.

For dance/movement artists.

Jan 24, 12–3PM
Q7 Studio | 77 E7th Ave

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 antonio@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

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About In Practice

In Practice is a program for continued education, peer-to-peer exchange, and knowledge sharing for dance teachers and leaders.

Register Now

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About 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.

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Jan 30, 1—3:30PM
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts // 149 W Hastings St.
Free. No RSVP required.

Drawing on PuSh’s Dramaturgy Clinics, this session invites artists and arts workers into a live, practice-driven exploration of creative questions. Internationally respected dramaturgs Marilou Craft, Joanna Garfinkel, Jana Svobodová, Yvette Nolan, and Andréane Leclerc will work through selected artistic dilemmas in real time—offering multiple dramaturgical lenses rather than fixed answers.
The session blends hands-on inquiry with practical provocations around context, relation, time, attention, and institutional conditions, and invites consideration of the dramaturgies shaping our work.
Come to listen, engage, and leave with new ways of thinking about your process—and the conditions in which performance is made and encountered.
Do you have a question you’d like a dramaturg to answer? A sticky point in a process, or a large sectoral conundrum? If you’re have a project that’s facing a challenge, or are curious about how nationally recognized dramaturgs could offer a fresh perspective, help over obstacles, or insight that could help you achieve your ambitions, submit your question here!

Facilitator: Joanna Garfinkel

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About the Speakers

Joanna Garfinkel (any) is Playwrights Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director and Dramaturg. Co-creator, with Yoshie Bancroft, of JAPANESE PROBLEM, performed site-specifically in Vancouver, at Soulpepper in Toronto, and across BC. Current dramaturgy includes: Kamila Sediego’s Engkanto, Christina Cook’s Postcards to My Younger Transsexual Self, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s Carry the One, and Mateusz Anais West’s Tomboy (Chłopczyca). Nominated for 3 Jessie awards; the Pure Research grant (Nightswimming, Toronto), Sydney Risk award for directing. Joanna moved to Unceded Coast-Salish territory to get an MFA in directing at UBC, and focus since has been primarily in new play development, multidisciplinary, and site-specific work.

Jana Svobodová is theatre director, dramaturg, lecturer, founder of the International Summer School of Documentary Theatre. As a theatre director Jana Svobodova works with people of different backgrounds like refugees, Romas, inhabitants of the South African townships, hip-hoppers, scientists, young people from east Naples, women of different professions and nationalities. Her recent projects Those who speak for themselves (2021), Perché non Io (2022) and Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience (2023) are questioning the issue of personal and common freedom. Her projects have been presented at festivals in the Czech Republic as well as in the US, Japan, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Poland, Slovenia and other countries. The performance Ordinary People (2018) she co-directed with the Chinese choreographer Wen Hui has been presented at the main program of Festival D’Avignon 2019 and festival D‘Automne in Paris 2019. Visit Jana’s website.

Marilou Craft (elle/she/they) lives in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal), where she works as an artist, author, translator, editor, lecturer and dramaturgical consultant. Her artistic practice is rooted in the margins she inhabits and which inhabit her: situated at the confluence of poetry and the performing arts, she probes the gray areas of the intimate and the political to embody their porosity.

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. She recently defended her Master’s thesis, about governance in non-profit theatres, at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.

Andréane Leclerc draws from her 20 years in circus to deconstruct the physical language of spectacle and reflect on contortion as a philosophical posture to create inter/transdisciplinary scenic work. She completed in 2013 a master’s degree on the dramaturgy of the circus body at UQAM. Her approach, centred on listening, relational ecology and perceptive attention, is at the heart of new bodily practices emerging from the fields of somatics and performance.

Friday, January 30, 4:00PM–5:30PM
Salon at Vancouver Playhouse // 600 Hamilton St.

Free with RSVP

Artists and presenters involved in a year-long Korea–Canada exchange—made possible with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and CAPACOA—share defining takeaways from sustained relationship-building across cultural contexts. The conversation offers insight into Korean performing-arts ecologies while illuminating alternative pathways for international relationship-building, and opens space to reflect on Canada’s own cultural ecosystem through the lens of exchange.

The session will be followed by light refreshments, creating an informal setting to continue dialogue.

RSVP by sending an email to jlharquail@gmail.com

Presented in Spanish (with live English translation)

February 4, 6-9PM
The Roundhouse | 181 Roundhouse Mews

A hands-on workshop where participants knead and shape bread as offerings to honour those who came before us. No experience is needed, just open hands and an open heart. The dough created will later become part of Argentinean artist Tiziano Cruz’s stage performance Wayqeycuna, connecting us through shared acts of remembrance and bread.

Register Now

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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 talk

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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

Supported by

Community Program Partner

Feb 6, 12–7PM
Scotiabank Dance Centre | 677 Davie Street

Drop-in participation welcome.
$5 per class | Max 30 participants per class
PWYC options available by email: info@vanvoguejam.com

Presented by Van Vogue Jam Arts Society

This workshop series offers an opportunity to meet and learn from Ballroom talent visiting Vancouver in conjunction with THE MOTHA’ KIKI BALL, in support of the local Ballroom scene.

Register Now

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Schedule & Workshops

12:30–2PM: Keeping Your Runway: A How-To Guide for Commentators
Notorious Telfar

An introduction to successful function commentary and maintaining energy on the runway. This session focuses on the role of the commentator in shaping atmosphere, pacing, and engagement during a ball.

2–3:30PM: Sex Appeal / Siren
Legendary Canadian Godmother Juju Louboutin

This workshop focuses on the physical language of sex appeal and seduction. Participants explore techniques used in Sex Siren and Sex Appeal performance, including:

• Intentional walk and stride
• Body isolations
• Floor work and transitions
• Eye contact and facial expression
• Breath as a tool for pacing and desire
• Battle presence and creating spotlight moments

Dress code: Comfortable clothing or something that makes you feel sexy; knee pads recommended for floor work; heels for all Femme categories.
Demographics: All levels welcome.
Key takeaways: Practical movement tools, foundational sensual connection, and breath control.

3:30–5PM: European Runway
Iconic Founding Mother Twiggy Pucci

Twiggy Pucci Garçon is a director, producer, organizer, and healer whose work spans performance, fashion, advocacy, and cultural leadership. International Mother of the Legendary House of Comme des Garçon, Chief Ambassador for the Center for Black Equity, and co-founder of All Tea, No Shade Productions, Twiggy brings extensive experience as a runway trainer, choreographer, and cultural producer.

5–6:30PM: Vogue Femme
NYC Mother Omi Unbothered Cartier

A process-based training with Omi Unbothered Cartier focused on expanding movement vocabulary and deepening Vogue Femme essence. This session emphasizes confidence, clarity, and developing an undeniable personal presence on the floor.

7–9PM: Black Folks Happy Hour

A dedicated space for Black folks in the Ballroom scene to connect. Food and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided.

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

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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).

Register Now

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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.

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

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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.

A movement training with SoKo Jena

January 16, 10–11:30 AM

Scotiabank Dance Centre | 677 Davie St
Drop-in participation welcome—attend one, two, or all three sessions.

Join Training Society of Vancouver, in partnership with The Dance Centre and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, for a TSV Special Delivery with SoKo Jena, PuSh Festival Artist in Residency.

This professional and pre-professional movement training is designed for dancers, movers, performers, and people with ongoing embodied and physical practices.

The Practice

Drawing from SoKo Jena’s jena_practice and the work of Jerahuni Movement Factory, this session weaves together traditional Zimbabwean performance forms with contemporary movement exploration. Participants are guided through rhythm, sensation, repetition, and improvisation to explore movement as a site of identity, resilience, and spiritual attunement.

The class offers a grounded yet expansive space—supporting both individual inquiry and collective awareness—where physical rigor meets ritual, and movement becomes a tool for listening, adaptation, and expression.

Register Now

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About the Artist

SoKo Jena is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer, and the founder of Jerahuni Movement Factory and jena_practice—platforms bridging traditional Zimbabwean performance with contemporary artistic expression. A graduate of the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) and the Dance Trust of Zimbabwe, his work explores identity, resilience, and spirituality through movement, sound, and ritual.

SoKo has collaborated with leading international artists including Peter John Sabbagha, Nora Chipaumire, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Boyzie Cekwana, and Mamela Nyamza, and his creations and classes have been shared at festivals and institutions worldwide.

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 3–6, 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

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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).

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.