Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) has today announced its 2026 spring season, a celebration of extraordinary performance and radical, socially conscious new work. The international programme for the next eight months includes four UK and World Premieres, two festivals and two building takeovers.
This season, the productions look through different lenses at how we live alongside each other, exploring desire, intimacy and connection in ambitious and provocative ways, playing with both form and sentiment. Offering its platform to a diverse range of creative and curatorial voices, freedom of artistic form and expression continues to lie at the heart of BAC’s work. Artists at all stages of their careers are represented, from centring young people with Homegrown, to presenting world-renowned artists making work about experiences both deeply specific and yet universally connected.
Pelin Ba?aran, Creative Director of Battersea Arts Centre says: “This season brings together bold, radical work that engages with the world as it is: complex, political, playful and alive. The programme speaks directly to communities and voices that are often marginalized, creating a season that is energising, provocative and unafraid to take risks. It invites audiences to consider what connects us, what we desire, and how we nurture one another in the imagining of alternative world.
Tarek Iskander, Artistic Director and CEO of Battersea Arts Centre says:
“BAC has always been a place where artists are trusted to take risks — with ideas, form and the questions they’re asking of the world. This season reflects that spirit, from work originated and developed here in our building on Lavender Hill, to artists from across the world coming through our doors. That belief in creative freedom goes hand in hand with our commitment to widening access with Pay What You Can tickets, so that ambitious, exceptional art and performance can be experienced by as many people as possible.”
In March, Italian creative duo Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo present The Present is Not Enough, inspired by cruising as a social and communal practice. Archival material, movement and an immersive soundscape reimagine the city as a space that can be open, intimate, and safe. Personal archives that trace creators Silvia and Ilenia’s relationship are woven together with the lives of their peers in the queer resistance movement of New York in the 70s and 80s. In this intimate and evocative work, Calderoni and Caleo shift between memory and longing to ask how past intimacies, collective living and unresolved struggles might help us imagine a shared, more inclusive future (26 – 27 March).
The World Premiere of BAC Production Second Trimesteropens in April, by Trans performance artist, Krishna Istha, and their mother, Geetha Shankar. With direction by Milli Bhatia (seven methods of killing kylie jenner, speed, king troll), this ambitious new show explores multi-generational pregnancy stories, loss, gender and the weight of inherited memories in a cinematic, Bollywood-inspired epic family saga. Following First Trimester (2023), Krishna takes to the stage with Geetha to tell their story and take back control of their narrative. This is the first BAC Production as part of Making Waves, a national commissioning and touring programmed supported by Arts Council England which will see two new BAC Productions tour the UK across 2026 and 2027. Tour details for Second Trimester will be announced in due course (14 – 25 April).
Weaving shared experiences of war, migration, resilience and identity, Pablo Lilienfeld and Federico Vladimir bring the UK Premiere of Monica, reimagining maternal legacies through a queer, non-traditional lens. Offering a striking theatrical tribute to kinship and memory, they study the intersection of their mothers’ journeys, following their parallel migrations from Argentina to Spain. Using archival visuals of Pablo’s late mother Monica’s paintings, and erotic photographs of Fede’s mother Monica taken by his father in the 80’s, the pair reconstruct both stories through dance, music drag and cabaret (1-2 May).
For more information visit: https://bac.org.uk. Header image: ‘The present is Not Enough’ by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, image by Rebecca Lena.