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 Daw 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’sRUNNER 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.”
For more information visit: https://transformfestival.org