CONTEST: Enter to Win Tickets to This Year’s PuSh Festival!

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is one of Vancouver’s signature events. Produced each January, the festival expands the horizons of Vancouver artists and audiences with work that is visionary, genre-bending, multi-disciplined, startling and original.

Featuring 20 original works from 12 countries, the festival lineup is dedicated to creative risk-taking and dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration. The 2023 PuSh Festival includes six world premieres and one North American debut, along with six Canadian and two Western Canadian openings and one Vancouver premiere. In addition to a strong Canadian presence, PuSh will also present works from Zimbabwe, Belgium, South Africa, South Korea, France, Argentina, Bulgaria, India, Italy, the United Kingdom, Finland and the United States.

PuSh 2023 is a poignant reminder of the power the arts have in bringing communities together to effect change.

In a time of increasingly visible impacts of climate change, of war, and of the rise of fascism, the future weighs heavy with uncertainty. Several works leave us hopeful for tomorrow: Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, for example, is a visual metaphor for this crucial moment in our “future history.”

Ontroerend Goed’s palindromic take on the climate crisis uses structure as metaphor, employing repetition and reversal to symbolize the need for a worldwide undoing of our actions. The play starts off with backward speech from the actors, but fear not: this strangeness is temporary, and as things become clearer the genius of the creation reveals itself.

Technically as well as formally ingenious, Are we not drawn onward to new erA turns time, movement and visuals on their heads — and, like the best works of radical art, it does so in the service of political meaning. It’s an artistic intervention in a matter of the utmost importance, and it uses temporality as a provocation. As we draw closer and closer to worldwide calamity, this work asks us to rethink human possibility.

“Are we not drawn onward to new erA is a cleverly staged, visually sumptuous dream — technically, a fantastic achievement, and artistically, a truly beautiful show full of pensive sadness,” says Dorothy Max Prior of Total Theatre Magazine.

One lucky Tyee reader will win two tickets for Are we not drawn onward to new erA, playing at Frederic Wood Theatre at the University of British Columbia, as well as a $100 Modo gift certificate to make travelling around the city during PuSh easy and sustainable. Tickets are for the showtime of your choice between Feb. 1 and Feb. 4, 2023. Enter to win below.

About the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is one of Vancouver’s signature events. Produced each January, the festival expands the horizons of Vancouver artists and audiences with work that is visionary, genre-bending, multi-disciplined, startling and original.

The festival showcases acclaimed international, Canadian and local artists and mixes them together with an alchemy that inspires audiences, rejuvenates artists, stimulates the industry and forges productive relationships around the globe. More than just shows, the festival is a broker of international partnerships, a meeting place for creative minds, a showcase of Canada’s best and an incubator of brilliant new work.

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