PuSh Festival 2023's line-up has six world premieres

Lovers of adventurous, boundary-pushing art that cuts across all disciplines, rejoice: PuSh International Performing Arts festival has announced its line-up for the 2023 festival, which will run from January 19 to February 6. 

The 18-day event, which spans theatre, dance, music, circus and multimedia, promises 20 original works of art from 12 different countries, including six world premieres and six Canadian debuts. 

“We are prioritizing innovative works that have a sense of necessity; that wake us up or offer new dreams for the disenchanted,” director of programming Gabrielle Martin said in a press release.

Martin, a cultural curator and choreographer and former Cirque de Soleil performer, joined PuSh last August. She was permanently appointed to the role in July, making 2023 her second year curating as part of the leadership team, alongside new director of operations Keltie Forsyth and director of Indigenous initiatives Margo Kane.

““We returned to our mandate of facilitating transformative experiences through live performance and, buoyed by this experience, it has been an honour to curate the 2023 Festival,” Martin notes.

Works from Belgium, Finland, Bulgaria, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, India, the U.K., the U.S., Zimbabwe, France and Italy will appear at the festival. There are 10 Canadian groups in the line-up, including local talent like Boca del Lupo, Electric Theatre Company, The Elbow/Itai Erdal, Delinquent Theatre/Lisa Ravensbergen, Marcus Youssef and Rakesh Sukesh, and Itsazoo Productions and Aphotic Theatre. 

Club PuSh, the festival’s beloved platform for intimate cabaret or weird and wonderful experiences, will run for three nights from February 2 to 4 at Performance Work, showtime 9 p.m. Vancouver collaborators Talking Stick, The Black Arts Centre, and frank theatre company will each curate a night’s performance.

Some performances will also be available online, in recognition of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Shows set to have their world premiere at PuSh 2023 are: 

* Delinquent Theatre’s The Seventh Fire (January 25-29 and February 1-5 at Lobe Studio), an immersive audio ceremony from Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen and sound designer Mishelle Cuttler that brings oral Anishinaabe stories into the everyday. 

* Rakesh Sukesh’s Because I love the diversity (this micro-attitude, we all have it) (January 29-31 at Performance Works), a solo performance that moves through dance, music and text to interrogate the use of technology in racial profiling. 

 * Electric Theatre Company’s An Undeveloped Sound (January 30 to February 4 at Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU), a theatrical performance inspired by Faust to interrogate the complexities of communication. 

* New Dance Horizons’ This and the last caribou (February 2 to 4 at Orpheum Annex), two world premieres of a series of three dance works that explore humanity’s relationship to history and nature. 

* The Elbow Theatre’s Soldiers of Tomorrow (February 3-5 at The Roundhouse Performance Centre), a theatrical production following a former IDF soldier exploring his personal responsibility as it relates to complex geopolitics in his home country.  

Tickets to individual PuSh events or festival passes are on sale now and available at pushfestival.ca

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