The winter months aren’t all doom and gloom: from January 18 to February 4, PuSh Festival returns to offer Vancouver some of the most innovative and inventive live art to warm our chilly hearts.

With 17 original works from 15 countries, including local, national, and international artists in the roster, there’s a huge breadth of shows on offer, encompassing everything from autobiographical carpentry theatre and rapped ruminations on policing in Black communities to a circus artist traversing a paper world.

“PuSh expands our consciousness by bringing our bodies in proximity and creating space to think,” says PuSh’s director of programming Gabrielle Martin, in her third year of festival curation, in a statement. “It triggers creative and political stimulation through local-international encounters, and it fosters a transmission of knowledge unique to the ephemeral community of an international festival.”

Four dance works are set to premiere at PuSh, cementing the city’s reputation as a hub of creative contemporary movement. 

Nellie Gossen’s Returns has a long run at Scotiabank Dance Centre Studios using clothing to examine garment labour, while Naishi Wang and Jean Abreu’s Deciphers examines the body as a hub of communication. Rakesh Sukesh’s trance-like because i love the diversity (this micro-attitude, we all have it), which has had its premiere delayed for a year, bursts onto stage at Performance Works; and Diana Lopez Soto’s Nomada also takes to the stage for the first time at the Annex, combining contemporary Mexican Indigenous folk dance with aerial performance. 

Other motion work includes two nights of science experiment-styled BLOT - Body Line of Thought; and the Canadian premiere of Ramanenjana, a docufiction about a dance epidemic that swept through Madagascar in 1863.

As ever, much of the art in the lineup is intensely pertinent to the present moment. Basel Zaraa’s installation Dear Laila is a model of his childhood home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, brought to the Fishbowl; The Runner is a visceral play examining an Orthodox Jew’s split-second decision to choose who he helps, set to show at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts; and asses.masses asks audiences to work together to play an epic game about social revolution. 

And if you want to see some really out-of-the-box stuff, Club PuSh returns for two nights on January 26 and 27. The cabaret-style events once again have one night each run by Indigenous festival Talking Stick and queer cohort frank theatre co.

Check out the full PuSh lineup or buy tickets here.