PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Wet Mess about TESTO, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 and 8 at Performance Works.

Show Notes

• Gabrielle and Wet Mess discuss:
• The origins of TESTO, particularly in what it meant to take hormones like testosterone
• Drag as a tool to discover oneself onstage
• Drag as a devising tool to generate choreography, narrative, etc.
• The historical aspects of drag
• Making gender explorations joyful
• The different personas that Wet Mess explores
• The oscillation between comedy and vulnerability
• The origin of the name "Wet Mess"
• What did the process of making this work reveal to you?
• What is next for Wet Mess?

About TESTO

TESTO celebrates transitions, testosterone and the edges of drag–a chaotic, heartfelt, and hilariously unhinged deep dive into the mess of becoming. Here, performance and reality blur until what's made-up somehow feels truer than truth. Expect moustache meals, dykey desires, and a choreography of guttural sexuality that pinches at the dull flesh of everyday life until it sparkles. At once absurd and sincere, TESTO finds the magical in the mundane—the moment when laughter curdles into revelation, and fantasy becomes flesh. It's awkward, erotic, disarming, and deeply human: a love letter to transition, embodiment, and all our leaking edges.

About Wet Mess

Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her homen with the dogs.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Wet Mess joined the conversation from London, UK.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Mother Bee Gvasalia, Savannah Sutherland, Ihomehe ("Legs"), and Menace Gvasalia about The Motha' Kiki Ball, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 at the Birdhouse.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and her guests discuss:

• How did Blackout Collective begin and what was that specific moment that compelled it?
• The significance and meaning of ballroom as gathering and performance
• Balancing competitive fire with fierce tenderness with honouring roots
• How chosen families show up, especially in ballroom
• How ballroom judges work and what they are looking for
• The stories that ballroom tells
• Waves of new talent entering the scene
• The challenge of learning technique vs. competing
• The Ballroom 101 Rapid Fire Round!

About The Motha' Kiki Ball

From vogue to runway, The Motha' Kiki Ball crowns motherhood as the origin story, legacy, and creative force behind Ballroom. Black Out, a collective centering Blackness in the local Kiki scene, leads this year's winter ball co-presented by PuSh and Van Vogue Jam. This Black History Month spectacular celebrates the power that gives life to cultures and movements. Expect looks that radiate iconic energy and a runway filled with matriarch moments.

About BlackOUT Collective

BlackOUT is a Vancouver-based Collective that centers Blackness within the Vancouver Kiki Ballroom scene. Our mission is to make Ballroom accessible to Black folks in Vancouver by creating entry points, fostering belonging and celebrating community. Since our inception in 2024, we've hosted several open sessions and produced "The Cookout Mini Kiki Ball", Vancouver's first Ball featuring an all Black production team and judging panel.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Savannah Sutherland joined the conversation from Accra, also called Ga, Ghana.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Vanessa Goodman about WAIL, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 26 and 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Vanessa discuss:

• Vanessa's current work and process on tour across the continent with BLOT
• The original impulses and images that inspired WAIL
• How the complexity becoming a parent today requires one to find joy in work
• What does it mean to navigate joy within community? How can joy be a regenerative force?
• The power of physiological change from performance
• How compression can be used in choreography
• The auditory and visual world of the piece
• The body as site between the individual and collective
• The meaning of collaboration and how to hold space for many voices

About WAIL

WAIL is a choreographic poem for our fractured moment.

Six performers move through a shifting landscape of sound, light, and breath, their bodies echoing the patterns and distortions of the natural world. Drawing from botanical forms and auditory illusion, the work becomes a living ecosystem where motion and vibration feed each other—fragile, unruly, and alive.

WAIL immerses audiences in a multi-sensory meditation on coexistence. Amid contrast and chaos, the work finds its rhythm in the act of collective joy: a wail that is both grief and celebration, a sound that gathers us back into the body of the world.

About Action at a Distance and Vanessa Goodman

Action at a Distance is based on the West Coast on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. The company is led by Artistic Director Vanessa Goodman and Artistic Producer Hilary Maxwell. Their work carries meaning beyond aesthetics, using choreography as a means to explore liminality within humanity. This exploration questions the boundaries of the human experience, emphasizing the interconnectedness of bodies, technology, and the natural world.

Their choreographic practice weaves together generative movement and sonic embodiment, creating immersive performative environments that aim to expand notions of identity, post-humanism and agency. Through their work, they seek to cultivate intimacy between the body and its surroundings, examining how these relationships redefine what it means to be an individual in a rapidly changing world. The company challenges conventional forms of performative hierarchy through collaborative approaches, inviting varied voices to reshape narratives around corporeality and Existence.

Goodman has received several awards and honours for the Company's works, including The Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2013), The Yulanda M. Faris Scholarship (2017/18), The Chrystal Dance Prize (2019 & 2024), the Schultz Endowment from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2019), The Isadora Award (2025) and participation in the "Space to Fail" program (2019/20) through Hyde Productions (NZ), Critical Path (AU), and The Dance Centre (CA). Longstanding collaborations include Graveyards and Gardens with Caroline Shaw, BLOT with Simona Deaconsecu, and multiple works with Loscil (Scott Morgan), Brady Marks, and James Proudfoot. Their works have toured Canada, the United States, Europe, and South America.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Vanessa joined the conversation from Calgary, in the traditional territories of the peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprised of the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut'ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations).

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Rainbow Chan about Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 4 at 7:30pm at the Chinese Canadian Museum.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Rainbow discuss:

• The unique collaboration and context of Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory
• The influence of Cantonese pop on Rainbow's work
• Voice as both instrument and archive
• Processing grief through song as an individual and collective
• The original sparks of interest to perform these particular songs
• The category of ritual song and music
• The fusion of folk with pop and electronica, and how tradition and futurity animate the process
• How theatre, as opposed to other artforms, affects the way in which an audience reads what is onstage
• What's next for Rainbow Chan?

About Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory

Rainbow Chan is a Hong Kong-Australian vocalist, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist celebrated for her inventive blend of heartfelt melodies, textured electronic production, and culturally rich storytelling. Her sound—both tender and experimental—reflects on migration, identity, and the intimate politics of love and loss.

Presented for one night only inside the Chinese Canadian Museum's Dream Factory: Cantopop Mandopop 1980s-2000 exhibition, this special live performance unfolds on Ming Wong's Vast Ocean, Boundless Skies stage—an installation that reimagines the legacy of Cantopop through diasporic lenses.

Fusing Cantopop, electronic music, Chinese folk laments, and experimental sound, Chan uses live looping, electronics, saxophone, and voice to explore resilience, identity, and connection across generations.

Through this convergence of sound, space, and story, Chan creates a distinctive and contemporary musical experience—an evening where cultural memory, sonic experimentation, and performance meet. The performance will be followed by an open mic karaoke party hosted by Rainbow Chan.

About Rainbow Chan

Rainbow Chan is an award-winning vocalist, producer and multi-disciplinary artist. Her practice bridges popular music and contemporary visual arts, exploring themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation, matrilineal histories and diasporic heritage. Central to her work is the research and reimagining of women's oral traditions, particularly the fading bridal laments of Weitou women, Hong Kong's first settlers, to whom she has deep ancestral ties. Through pop music, performance and immersive installations, she translates these endangered songs into contemporary art forms, preserving their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity. She is particularly interested in the power of ritual, song and performance as both a means of reclaiming agency and a living archive.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Rainbow joined the conversation from the unceded territories of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, in what is today called Australia.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript

Am Johal, Executive Artistic Director of the Indian Summer Festival, guest hosts this episode! He chats with Rakesh Sukesh about Invisibles, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 26 at the Vancity Culture Lab (the Cultch).

Show Notes

Am and Rakesh discuss:

• The trajectory and transitions of Rakesh's artistic and professional life
• Rakesh's Bollywood background
• How Rakesh dealt with his early social anxiety through dance and performance
• The challenges of creating art after strict Bollywood training
• The various traditions woven into Rakesh's work, including yoga
• How Rakesh situates his work globally, and how it received differently
• Influence of martial arts on Rakesh's dance practices
• The origins of Invisibles and its formation
• How to make work in this very troubled time in the world
• The concept that all people can be diamonds or demons

About Invisibles

In residency with his new creation Invisibles, Rakesh Sukesh—the artist behind because i love the diversity, this micro-attitude we all have it (PuSh 2024)—confronts the brutal realities of the Kafala system, which has enabled modern-day slavery across parts of the Middle East. Drawing from his own family's history, he interlaces visceral movement, stark statistics, and documentary theatre to reveal the human cost of economic migration and to ask urgent questions about whose lives and suffering we choose to value. Sukesh weaves ritual dance and funeral song from the Tamil-Nadu region in India into a powerful meditation on grief, dignity, and remembrance.

Rakesh Sukesh's work emerges from a life deeply shaped by movement—across borders, traditions, and generations. With a career spanning over 25 years, he has captivated audiences worldwide as a performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer. His journey began in Bollywood dance and South Indian cinema before evolving toward contemporary movement infused with his family's lineage of yoga and embodied disciplines such as Kalarippayattu and other Indian dance forms. His international career has cultivated a language of physicality that bridges precision and spiritual depth.

About Am Johal

Am Johal has previously been Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative and host of the podcast, Below the Radar. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015), co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). He is currently Chair of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vice Chair of Greenpeace Canada and a board member with the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture. He has presented his work internationally, including the Oxford Literature Festival.

About Rakesh Sukesh

With a career spanning over 25 years, Rakesh has captivated audiences worldwide as a versatile performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer. His journey through the realms of artistry began in Bollywood dance, where he lent his talents to numerous films in South India. Evolving his craft, Rakesh found a new passion in Contemporary movement art, drawing inspiration from his family's lineage of yoga and disciplines like Kalarippayattu and other Indian dance forms.

For the past 15 years, he has traversed the globe, immersing himself in diverse cultures and artistic landscapes, shaping his unique perspective and vision. Experience the culmination of Rakesh's passion, dedication, and global influences in every performance and creation.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle Martin chats with Cecilia Kuska about her work as a producer as well as Wayqeycuna, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival and co-presented by Latincouver: February 6 and 7 at the Roundhouse in Vancouver, BC.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Cecilia discuss:

• The work of Tiziano Cruz and how Cecilia's understanding has been shaped by his process and artistry
• How performance can be political without losing its complexity of creativity
• What it means to hold the space with theatrical work
• How community engagement is realized and makes sense of each locality
• Previous times at PuSh
• Cecelia's own practice to find what is on the margins
• Different barriers and cultural policies within other countries
• The approaches that guide your own model and curatorial thinking
• How curation is about asking and listening
• How to support new producers and artists
• The wider landscape and artistic futures of contemporary Latin American performance

About Wayqeycuna

Like a quipu—the intricate system of knotted cords used by Andean peoples to record memory and knowledge—Wayqeycuna traces Argentinean artist Tiziano Cruz's path back to his childhood in the Andean north. Through a poetic layering of testimony, ritual, and performance, Cruz reassembles fragments of collective and personal history, each knot an invocation of ancestry, each gesture a measured rebellion against erasure. Drawing from archival research and community memory, the work reflects on the violent devastation of cultural and communal life under neoliberalism and enduring racial hierarchies.

As the final piece in Cruz's trilogy Tres Maneras de Cantarle a una Montaña (Three Ways of Singing to a Mountain), which includes Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall) presented at the 2023 PuSh Festival, Wayqeycuna unfolds as an act of return and repair: a lament for what has been taken, and a celebration of what persists.

About Cecilia

Cecilia began her career in the arts as an independent photographer, cinematographer, and combined arts student, producing exhibitions and short films. This personal exploration soon expanded into a collaborative impulse: she found herself increasingly drawn to supporting others in bringing their artistic visions to life, always guided by a sensitive and creative eye for detail. Over the past 15 years, she has developed and produced cultural projects across the globe, working at the intersection of disciplines and identities, with a strong commitment to international collaboration, contemporary creation, and institutional transformation.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Cecilia joined the conversation from Brussels, Belgium.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Credits

PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

Show Transcript