What makes PuSh resonate — beyond its scale and international roster — is its commitment to unsettling, surprising, and trusting audiences to keep up. This is a festival that doesn’t simply collect “the best of” global performance; it frames questions worth asking about how we live now. Across 25 performances drawn from 17 countries, including six world premieres and several Canadian and Vancouver debuts, the lineup is both fiercely experimental and deeply attuned to the urgent conversations of our time: belonging, displacement, remembrance, myth-making, and politics of the body. 

In anticipation of PuSh 2026, RANGE is previewing five showcases that challenge how we listen, see, and feel.

Trouble Score – Luanda Casella / Pablo Casella / ntgent (Belgium/Brazil)

February 7 | Vancouver Playhouse

Trouble Score is an eerily playful reckoning with memory and the secrets that linger in family histories. What begins as a family scandal slowly bends under the weight of history, childhood, and the faint echo of a military dictatorship, folding into something darkly comic and disorienting. Sound hums and snaps around you, lights carve corners that shouldn’t exist, and for a moment you’re not sure if you’re watching, remembering, or being remembered. As it settles in your mind, you’re caught between laughter and unease, stirring curiosity about the stories you inherit, the ones you tell, and those that shape you without asking. | TICKETS & INFO

JEZEBEL – Cherish Menzo / Frascati Producties in conjunction with GRIP (The Netherlands/Belgium)

January 22 and 23 | Scotiabank Dance Centre

In JEZEBEL, the “video vixen” isn’t a stereotype — she’s both a body in motion and a story being rewritten in real time. Movement, hip hop visual language, and the slowed, distorted pulse of chopped‑and‑screwed sound stretch the image until its artifice becomes agency. The performance is humorous and defiant, with moments that catch your attention in unexpected ways: a glance, a beat, a pause that insists you consider how Black femininity has been consumed, fetishized, and misunderstood. What emerges is a portrait of self-possession where the muse is also the maker. Watching it, you feel the weight of the past, the thrill of transformation, and the sharp pleasure of seeing someone take control of a story that was never theirs to tell. | TICKETS & INFO

Everything Has Disappeared – UNIT Productions & Mammalian Diving Reflex, in collaboration with The Chop (Canada)

January 29, 30, 31, and February 1 | York Theatre

Everything Has Disappeared is like suddenly noticing the gears turning in a machine you thought ran itself. Ships, factories, care homes — ordinary places, ordinary labour — unfold on stage as if they’ve been waiting just for you to see them. Labour that powers economies, sustains lives, and vanishes is suddenly vivid, and you feel the absence in your chest before you can name it. It’s playful, clever, and slightly infuriating, the way good magic is, leaving you aware of what usually goes unnoticed and the weight of all the invisible hands keeping the world upright. | TICKETS & INFO

Orpheus – Alan Lake Factori(e) (Canada)

January 30 and 31 | Vancouver Playhouse

Orpheus is a plunge that you feel in your chest before your eyes. The performers move through space as if the ground itself might open beneath them, shifting between intimate gestures and moments of vast, almost unbearable scale. Light and shadow bend reality, turning bodies into fleeting landscapes, while the choreography puts recklessness and tenderness together so tightly you can’t separate one from the other. Orpheus makes you hyperaware of your own fractures and the spaces between connection and isolation, a reminder that change often burns before it illuminates. | TICKETS & INFO

Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience – Archa – Centre of Documentary Theatre (Czech Republic)

January 22 and 23 | Waterfront Theatre

Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience is both gentle and insistent, like noticing someone’s life unfolding in moments that you weren’t supposed to see. The performers carry small gestures — pouring tea, adjusting a chair, humming a tune — that suddenly feel monumental, fragile proof of survival. Text and music fade in and out, sometimes precise, sometimes slipping through your fingers, and you realize the weight of what persists in the shadows of war. There’s fleeting and sharp humour, tenderness that insists on being felt, and a strange sense of hope, revealing endurance where you least expect it. | TICKETS & INFO

PuSh International Performing Arts Festival 2026 runs Jan. 22 to Feb. 8 at various venues around Vancouver, BC.

For more info visit pushfestival.ca