Serving as an antidote to this epidemic of mediocrity circling the arts like a vulture, the second annual Warrior Festival crashes into Vancouver like a thunderstorm over scorched earth. Taking over all three venues at The Cultch from February 11 to March 29, the festival brings six urgent, experimental, and irresistibly subversive works to the city’s east side in a meticulously curated showcase that seasoned thespians and avant-garde acolytes alike won’t want to miss.

Described by Artistic Director Heather Redfern as featuring “the bravest shows touring anywhere right now,” Warrior Festival delivers some of the boldest performance art, comedy, poetry, and experimental theatre on the global circuit straight to Vancouver stages.

Dedicated to privileging the brave, the radical, and the contradictory, Warrior Festival celebrates “joyful resistance” through disruptive, rollicking, and unsettling performance. It creates space for transformational narratives, histories, and conversations to unfold without restraint.

With artists and productions arriving from New Zealand, Australia, Palestine, and the Edinburgh Fringe, alongside a powerful lineup of Canadian work, the festival forms a geography of daring performance that gains resonance through thoughtful curation. There’s no algorithm at work here — these shows are intentionally assembled to shock, inspire, and challenge audiences to rediscover the thrill of the transgressive. They’re ferocious, fierce, and fun — but most importantly, fleeting.

If you know what’s good for you, carve a few hours out of your winter to witness some of the most inventive and courageous performance art to hit Vancouver stages before it disappears. Read on to discover which of the six featured works speaks to your subconscious — or better yet, sounds like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Batshit – Leah Shelton & Quiet RIOT (Australia)

February 11–15 | Historic Theatre

This poignant, colourful, and shockingly funny one-woman show about the mythology and cultural misconceptions of female madness makes its Canadian premiere at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre. Written and performed by self-described “psycho-siren” Leah Shelton, Batshit is part medical historiography, part personal biography — an electrifying soliloquy on medicalized misogyny and gender bias in modern psychiatry.

Directed by Olivier Award-winner Ursula Martinez and drawing from Shelton’s own family history of psychiatric incarceration, Batshit lands somewhere between The Bell Jar and Fleabag: polemic and powerhouse, rambunctious, rigorously researched, rebellious, and riotous. | TICKETS & INFO

UPU – UPU Collective (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

February 17–21 | York Theatre

Following a sold-out run at the Sydney Opera House, UPU arrives in Canada as a poetic patchwork of Māori and Pasifika literature as sweeping as the ocean itself. Curated by Grace Iwashita-Taylor, the production weaves together upu (“words”) from 23 activists, poets, writers, and artists, spanning five decades of storytelling from across Te Moana nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean).

The result is a living architecture of stories that embodies the shared and divergent perspectives of people connected by the world’s largest body of water. It’s a fitting premiere for The Cultch, long committed to platforming Indigenous, Pacific, and formally adventurous work. Can’t make it to Vancouver? UPU tours Canada after its festival run. | TICKETS & INFO

Red Like Fruit – 2b Theatre Company (Halifax)

February 18–22 | Historic Theatre

It’s no small feat to stage a minimalist two-person thriller about sexual politics, power, memory, and complicity in the post-#MeToo era, yet Red Like Fruit pulls it off with chilling precision.

Following Lauren (Michelle Monteith), an investigative journalist covering a high-profile domestic violence case, the play slowly unravels into a tense meditation on trauma, memory, and the fragility of truth. From Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Hannah Moscovitch, Red Like Fruit offers a provocative and deeply urgent framework for questioning who gets to shape the stories we tell about women’s lives. | TICKETS & INFO

Tomboy (Chłopczyca) – the frank theatre company (Vancouver)

March 4–8 | Vancity Culture Lab

World premieres of experimental dance-theatre are rare — and even rarer when they’re as beguiling, kinetic, and sensorial as Tomboy. Written by Vancouver playwright Anais Mateusz West, choreographed by Oh Augustine, and dramaturged by Joanna Garfinkel, the piece explores masculinity, eroticism, and memory with supernatural grandeur.

Blending Slavic folklore (upiory — vampiric spirits), queer identity, and themes of myth and autonomy, Tomboy creates a lush, otherworldly experience that theatre and dance communicate more viscerally than film ever could. | TICKETS & INFO

People, Places & Things – The Search Party (Vancouver)

March 10–22 | Historic Theatre

Directed by local legend Mindy Parfitt, this production marks The Search Party’s return to Warrior Festival with a blisteringly sharp exploration of addiction and recovery. Following Emma, an actress in rehab, People, Places & Things dismantles tidy narratives of sobriety, exposing the messy, nonlinear reality underneath.

Formally inventive, uncomfortably hilarious, and emotionally unflinching, it’s a production that promises to leave audiences shaken in the best possible way. | TICKETS & INFO

The Horse of Jenin – Troupe Courage (Amsterdam)

March 25–29 | Historic Theatre

Perhaps the festival’s most genre-bending offering, Palestinian actor and comedian Alaa Shehada’s The Horse of Jenin refuses to be confined to a single form. Blending memory, stand-up, mask work, and drama, the show explores the fate of a beloved Jenin horse sculpture — a symbol of hope destroyed in 2023 — while weaving a coming-of-age story under occupation.

Rejecting the language of revenge, Shehada instead leans into humour, imagination, and resilience. The result is theatre at its boldest and most unconventional: a singular work from a rising voice in contemporary performance. | TICKETS & INFO