TRANSFORM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES FULL PROGRAMME

• The UK’s leading festival of powerful and international performance returns to Leeds from 21-25 October 2025. 
• 14 companies from 12 different countries will come together to explore everything from pop culture, colonialism, working class stories, the radical history of Reggae and exploitation of migrant women’s labour; presented in innovative ways from large scale projections, a one to one experience and a performance-banquet.

 

• With an eclectic mix of dance, theatre, performance and immersive installations, the festival features performances from artists including Dan Daw Creative Projects (UK), Ahamefule J. Oluo (USA), Katja Heitmann (Netherlands), MEXA (Brazil) and Amrita Hepi (Australia). 
• Tickets to all performances are available now with all events operating Pay What You Can ticket pricing.

 

 

Transform, the UK’s leading festival for inclusive, international performance, has today announced the full programme for the 2025 edition of the festival. Taking over the city of Leeds from 21– 25 October, Transform 25 will present 14 bold, socially conscious performances that reflect and respond to a rapidly changing global landscape.

29 artists from all over the world – including Australia, Brazil, Jamaica, Palestine, The Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland and the US – assemble alongside artists from Leeds and across the UK to present visceral performances, intimate installations and moments of assembly which will be presented in unusual locations and iconic venues throughout Transform’s home city of Leeds. Exchanging ideas, memories, stories and history, these 14 performances that sit at the intersection of different artforms, will challenge perceptions and invite audiences and artists alike to imagine a different kind of future.

Transform 25 is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and funded by Leeds City Council & UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

 

 

PERFORMANCES

• Multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Amrita Hepi weaves personal narratives with the history of colonialism, art, feminism and pop culture in intimate new solo performance Rinse.
• From the precise choreography of drum majorettes, to the movements of white femme starlets and gestures associated with masculine Black rap stars, Tiran Willemse’s blackmilk is an intense solo performance examining limiting stereotypes and shifting identities. A UK premiere.
• Situated somewhere between jazz and stand-up comedy is The Things Around Us – a darkly humorous solo performance by Ahamefule J. Oluo featuring live music, comedy and storytelling. A UK premiere.
• Dan Dawn Creative Projects bring EXXY – the latest from Dan Daw, a Queer, crippled dance artist feeling the pressure to stay on top after the smash-hit world tour of his last show.
• Free is a joyful, immersive dance show that celebrates Reggae and its radical history with original dub music from Leeds’ own Akeim Toussaint Buck. A world premiere.
• Eve Stainton’s unnerving choreographic performance explores societal suspicion with The Joystick and The Reins, accompanied by a soundtrack featuring music from an 80s horror film performed live by the Airedale Symphony Orchestra.
• Taking place simultaneously in the theatre and through the streets of Leeds, Ira Brand’s RUNNER explores running, exhaustion and why we value people when they’re pushing themselves to their limits? A UK premiere.
• Interweaving performance, pageantry and possession, Magic Maids, from duo Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera, is both a ritual and a dance performance that connects the European witch hunts to the exploitation of migrant women’s labour. A UK premiere.
• Brazilian artist collective MEXA returns to Transform with The Last Supper – an autobiographical performance-banquet focusing on food, farewells, religion and transition in a party atmosphere, with an overarching sense of both melancholy and joy.
• A vulgar, visceral and vampy whirlwind performance from Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray, IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!!! uses the basic tools of theatre and DIY performance to explore the peculiarity of constructing performance and of constructing the self. A UK premiere.
• Surrender is an experimental one-off event of entertainment, food and conversation by performance, possession + automation with an exciting line-up of artists exploring what happens when artists surrender themselves to forces they can’t control.

 

INSTALLATIONS

• Dear Laila is an interactive installation experienced by one person at a time from UK/Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa. This intimate performance shares the Palestinian story of displacement and resistance through one family.

 

• The movements of people from Leeds are projected on a monumental scale in PERPETUUM – an immersive and deeply moving video installation from Netherlands based artist Katja Heitmann, co-presented by Transform, Light Night and Yorkshire Dance. A UK premiere.

 

SPECIAL EVENTS

• Doomsday Disco is a party at the end of the world as we know it…or the beginning of a new dawn. Transform 25’s grand finale is hosted by the creators of the iconic Leeds club, Love Muscle.

Creative Director, Amy Letman says:

“Two years on from our last major international festival, the artists at the forefront of Transform 25 present performance works that respond to our complex and challenging moment. Transform 25 invites us to pause and reflect on our own responsibility for where we’ve been so far, and where we’re heading next. The festival features productions by intrepid individual performers, large-scale portraits of people and place, an intimate one to one experience, and the chance to resist and summon collective joy together through celebration and community. In a moment that feels so unrelenting, we need more than ever to create space for reflection, connection, hope, and to dream up new possibilities. It’s in this spirit that we assemble Transform 25 and build towards this October.”

 

FULL PROGRAMME

Transform 25 Opening Moment 

Tue 21 Oct, 5.30pm

stage@leeds, University of Leeds

Free, booking required

 

Join us to mark the beginning of 5 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.

 

 

Rinse
Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor (Australia)
Tuesday 21 October, 7pm
stage@leeds, University of Leeds

Rinse is 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?

Hepi’s electric new performance questions whether being on the brink of extinction—a series of endings of various kinds—has intensified the seduction of the past. With a dynamic improvisational score, Rinse expands Hepi’s fascination with hybridity under empire and contemporary dance’s fixation with the ‘neutral’ body.

This Bundjalung (Australia) and Ngāpuhi (Aotearoa/New Zealand) multidisciplinary artist unfolds her research through movement, celebrating dance as a place of memory and resistance.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and stage@leeds.

Produced by Performing Lines and supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body. Supported by Performance Space and Supercell: Festival of Contemporary Dance through The Makers Program. Commissioned by Carriageworks, Dancehouse, and the Keir Foundation for the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award.

blackmilk
Tiran Willemse (South Africa/Switzerland)
Tuesday 21 October, 8.30pm
Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre, Northern Ballet

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’.

blackmilk is the first part of the Willemse’s trompoppies trilogy. ‘Trompoppies’ is Afrikaans and describes drum majorettes in uniform.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre.

Co-produced by Sophiensaele, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee and WP Zimmer.

Surrender
performance, possession + automation and various artists
Wednesday 22 October, 12pm
The Warehouse in Holbeck

In this one-off event an exciting line-up of artists explore what happens when they surrender themselves to forces they don’t control – to the rigours of technique, to an inescapable rhythm, to a secret code, or by tuning in to other powers.

 

Expect a day of playful experiment and serious entertainment, with food and conversation. How does it feel to surrender together?

 

Tickets are Pay What You Can and include lunch and refreshments.

 

Line-up includes: Åbäke, Gillian Dyson, Tara Fatehi, Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray, Samra Mayanja, Imogen Reeves, Eve Stainton and POPPERFACE.

 

Co-curated by Orlagh Woods and Transform.

 

performance, possession + automation is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and supported by Queen Mary University of London and University of Leeds. Academic project leads are Nicholas Ridout and Dhanveer Singh Brar. Partners are Transform and Fierce.

 

The Things Around Us
Ahamefule J. Oluo (USA)
Wednesday 22 October, 7.15pm

 

In this solo performance – somewhere between jazz and stand-up comedy – darkly humorous true stories about other people mix with a haunting soundscape.

Uplifting and bleak, deep and silly, a musical score is created live, electronically looping clarinet, trumpet and everyday objects.

This final piece in an acclaimed trilogy of works inverts the formula of the first two pieces – of autobiographical anecdotes and large ensembles – with stories about other people, other places, and other times set to intimate solo soundscapes that seem to emerge from thin air.

Ahamefule J. Oluo (they/them) is an acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance.

Supported by a grant from The MAP Fund.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Howard Assembly Room.

EXXY
Dan Daw Creative Projects (UK)
Wednesday 22 & Thursday 23 October, 7pm
Leeds Playhouse

How do you continue to value yourself when society doesn’t value you?

Dan Daw, a Queer, crippled dance artist, is feeling the pressure to stay at the top of his game after the smash-hit world tour of his last show.

Audacious, vulnerable and tender, EXXY (Aussie slang for ‘that’s expensive mate’) is about imposter syndrome and fluctuating self-worth. Set against the backdrop of the Australian outback, EXXY takes us back to where Dan began – working class, with very little – to reflect on how far he has come.

Joined by three performers who walk and talk like him, Dan is comforted by the possibility of finally being able to blend in after a lifetime of standing out.

 

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Leeds Playhouse.

Co-commissioned by Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Battersea Arts Centre, Transform, Take Me Somewhere and Tramway for the New Dimensions commission. Additionally co-commissioned by Fabric, Kampnagel, Sadlers Wells, SICK! Festival and Les Halles. Supported by Arts Council England and Cockayne 10th Anniversary Grants for the Arts. R&D supported by an Unlimited Strategic Award 2023.

Co-produced by Battersea Arts Centre.

Dear Laila
Basel Zaraa (UK/Palestine)
Thursday 23, Friday 24 and Saturday 25 October, 10am.
Leeds Kirkgate Market

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.

Dear Laila explores how war and exile are experienced through everyday, domestic and public spaces. Experienced by one audience member at a time, Dear Laila uses the retelling of memories and tactile details to bring this now destroyed place to life.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Leeds Kirkgate Market.

Commissioned by Good Chance Theatre, with support from Arts Council England.

Free
Toussaint To Move (Jamaica/UK)
Thursday 23 October, 8.30pm
Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Becket University

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.

Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, Transform and ARC Stockton (via The Make New Work Programme, supported by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation) and funded via Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants.

PERPETUUM
Katja Heitmann (Netherlands)
Thursday 23 and Friday 24 October, 6–10pm

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.

In Perpetuum, the movements of people from Leeds are projected on a monumental scale. As you get closer to their holograms, you stand face to face with them and hear the stories behind their movements. In a sea of light, your personal movement also becomes visible.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform, Light Night and Yorkshire Dance and supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK.

Supported by Fonds Podiumkunsten, Gemeente Tilburg and Provincie Noord Brabant . Co-produced by Media Art Festival, SPRING and Yorkshire Dance.

The Joystick and The Reins
Eve Stainton (UK)
Friday 24 October, 8pm
The Warehouse in Holbeck

Eve Stainton’s unnerving choreographic performance explores societal suspicion and the construction of threat. As a solo figure moves amongst us, the Airedale Symphony Orchestra play a live soundtrack – the music from 80s horror film The Thing.

The Joystick and The Reins interrogates who decides who and what is a ‘threat’ within society, and how these ideas are reinforced through systems of oppression and authoritarianism.

Reproducing intense, hyper-emotional states, Stainton’s references include historical reenactments, police and riot arrest imagery, and 1980s ‘Crime Watch’ episodes.

Complicating ideas of power and dominance, perpetrator and victim, threat and interpretation, the show asks what it means to reconstruct a theatrical scene that draws on truth, and what societal constructs keep people at risk.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Slung Low’s The Warehouse in Holbeck.

Co-commissioned by Bold Tendencies, Dansehallerne, Transform, The Place and performance, possession + automation (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Supported by Queen Mary University of London, Old Diorama Arts Centre, Den Frie Udstilling, SLUG and L’Ecart Biennial.

RUNNER
Ira Brand (Netherlands)
Saturday 25 October, 2pm
Carriageworks Theatre

Taking place simultaneously in the theatre and on the streets of Leeds, RUNNER is a performance about running and exhaustion. Why do we value people when they push themselves to their limits?

Setting a pace, covering distance, breaking a sweat – a woman is running outside of the theatre. You’re invited to witness this unfamiliar body making its way through the city. Is she seeking something, or is she making an escape?

RUNNER by Ira Brand explores the interwoven and contradictory joys, miseries and potentials of all types of exhaustion.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Carriageworks  Theatre and supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK.

Coproduced by Frascati Producties, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, CAMPO and Battersea Arts Centre. Supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and Ammodo.

Magic Maids
Eisa Jocson & Venuri Perera (Philippines & Sri Lanka)
Saturday 25 October, 5pm
Leeds School of Art, Leeds Becket University

Magic Maids interweaves performance, pageantry and possession. This feral incantation connects the European witch hunts to the exploitation of migrant women’s labour today.

The female figures of the witch and the maid are powerful and powerless, feared and revered, used, accused and discarded. The tropes are not mere hearsay and history but deeply rooted in today’s psyche.

International artists Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera have collected stories of migrant domestic workers from the so-called Global South, the echoes of which now haunt their bodies. In Magic Maids – the broom – a domestic cleaning tool, as well as the vehicle of the witch – becomes an extension of their body, that transforms oppression into feminist resistance.

The duo dance a ritual of disobedience.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Leeds School of Arts and supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK.

Produced by Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. Co-produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Frascati Producties (unterstützt durch Ammodo), Tanzquartier Wien, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Festival Theaterformen, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, Kampnagel, Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain, La briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne, Points Communs – nouvelle scène nationale Cergy-Pontoise / Val d’Oise, Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. Funded within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture, Research, Science and the Arts. Supported by Ammondo, Kaserne Basel, Puón Institute Philippines, Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka, Dance Nucleus in collaboration with Studio Plesungan as part of ARTEFACT Creative Residency, Colomboscope Contemporary Art Festival 2024.

The Last Supper
MEXA (Brazil)
Saturday 25 October, 7pm
Leeds Playhouse

Food, farewells, religion, transition – Brazilian artist collective MEXA present The Last Supper, a performance-banquet.

MEXA was formed in 2015 following episodes of gender-based violence in homeless shelters in São Paulo. The group has lost members along the way; some current members think they too might soon be gone.

The Last Supper is a feast of melancholy and joy. Life and art merge; theatre and the street meet; autobiography intertwines with religious references.

Queering Western art historical perspectives, MEXA create their own Last Supper, with a party atmosphere and a powerful sense of solidarity.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Take Me Somewhere, and Leeds Playhouse.

A co-production by Casa do Povo, Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Kampnagel.

IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!!!
Samir Kennedy & Sean Murray (UK/ France)
Saturday 25 October, 9.15pm
The Warehouse in Holbeck

Vulgar, visceral and vampy, IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!!! explores the artists’ fascination with the filthy and the glamorous, the pathetic and the perverse.

Bear witness to the bare arses of Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray in this whirlwind performance.

References abound to familiar double acts alongside double entendres as they unearth the only real concrete thing there is in this business: instability.

An infinite, infernal foreplay of a ‘cabaret’, IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!! exposes the precarity of constructing performance and of constructing the self. Using the basic tools of theatre and DIY performance – microphones, speakers, lights and set – the duo question if the way we produce our identities is all that different to how we put on a show.

Embracing the ugliness and chaotic beauty of becoming and unbecoming, IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!!  traces the intricate dances of subjugation, subversion and seduction we’re all forced into as performers, artists and humans, just trying to get on with it.

Performances at Transform 25 co-presented by Transform and Slung Low’s The Warehouse in Holbeck.

Co-produced by Ballet National de Marseille, Battersea Arts Centre, performance, possession + automation, Maison Saint-Gervais and Transform.

Supported by Arts Council England.

Doomsday Disco
The Pleasuredome Must Be Built x Transform (UK)
Saturday 25 October, 10pm
Testbed

Queer communities have been refining the skills for resistance under capitalism since its beginning. Summoning collective joy amidst harrowing circumstances is key. Is this is a party at the end of the world as we know it… or the beginning of a new dawn? Join Transform 25‘s grand finale, hosted by the creators of iconic Leeds club night Love Muscle.

Presented by Love Muscle in collaboration with Transform