Join Transform for an immersive, deeply moving video installation presented in collaboration with Light Night and Yorkshire Dance.
Choreographer Katja Heitmann collects and preserves ‘human movement’ in the Motus Mori archive. Over 2000 people, including from Leeds, have contributed their personal gestures to this archive.
Leeds’ very own Akeim Toussaint Buck presents Free, a joyful, immersive dance show that celebrates Reggae and its radical history.
This powerful performance is a quest to challenge the confines of borders, flags and occupied lands, to find joy in the darkest hour.
Nyabinghi rhythms vibrate, jazz influences unfold and vivid storytelling underpins this high energy dance show.
With original dub music, you’re invited to gather, skank and lively up yourself, until we're all free.
Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Leeds School of Arts.
Join Transform for this solo performance by Ahamefule J. Olu. This is a meeting point between jazz and stand-up comedy - where darkly humorous true stories about other people are mixed with haunting soundscapes.
Uplifting and bleak, deep and silly, a musical score is created live, electronically looping clarinet, trumpet and everyday objects.
Through the story of one family, this intimate, interactive installation shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance.
The seeds of Dear Laila were planted when Basel Zaraa’s five-year-old daughter began to ask him about his home growing up. Unable to take her there, he decided he would try to bring the place to her, by creating a model of his childhood home in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.
Dancer and choreographer Tiran Willemse presents an intense and tension-filled solo performance.
From the precise choreography of drum majorettes in uniform, to the melodramatic movements of white femme starlets and gestures associated with masculine Black rap stars, Willemse examines limiting stereotypes and shifting identities.
Through a focus on hand gestures, blackmilk complicates a mainstream repertoire of legible identities, opening them up to a complex sensitivity that the artist describes as ‘black male melancholia’.
Join Transform for Rinse - an intimate yet epic solo performance about the allure of new beginnings.
Dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi weaves personal narratives with the history of colonialism, art, feminism and pop culture, and asks: is it possible to start again?
Join Transform to mark the beginning of five days of powerful international performance and art about now, right here in Leeds.
Gather with other festival goers and stage@leeds to raise a toast to the start of the festival at this informal gathering moment. This event will be followed by the performance of Rinse by Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor, which you’ll need a separate ticket for.
Part of Transform 25 international performance festival: transformfestival.org
Human life is fleeting, the world is still unfolding…
Redefining Dance of the African Diaspora with a contemporary outlook, ACE Dance and Music’s bold new double bill presents two powerful, contrasting visions of our world today, told through exhilarating and emotive breathtaking physicality – what are you willing to die for?
Community Workshop with ACE Dance and Music a company rooted in the values and inspiration of African and Caribbean tradition seen through a contemporary lens
This is an open access class exploring current repertoire, suitable for ages 14+
This activity is supported Arts Council England.
Follow the scandalous true story of a Suffragette-turned-Fascist in this time bending cabaret.
VENUS 2.0 is a high-octane dance theatre experience exploring the chaos and turmoil of the early 20th-century.
Six chameleonic dancers take you on a white-knuckle ride through the evolution of Fascism. Enter a world of explosive physicality, hilarious cabaret and an obsession with the future. Why did it start? How does it stop? Where does it end?