Transform, the UK’s leading festival of powerful and international performance, is returning to Leeds this October. This includes a bold theatre programme featuring artists such as Ahamefule J. Oluo, Samir Kennedy & Sean Murray and Basel Zaraa offering provocative and socially conscious performances, reflecting a rapidly changing global landscape.
Some highlights
- The solo performance The Things Around Us from Ahamefule J. Oluo sits somewhere between jazz and stand-up comedy, where darkly humorous true stories about other people mix with a haunting soundscape.
- Brazilian artist collective MEXA present performance-banquet The Last Supper: a feast of melancholy and joy where life and art merge; theatre and the street meet; autobiography intertwines with religious references.
- Audacious, vulnerable and tender, EXXY from Dan Daw, a Queer, crippled dance artist (Aussie slang for ‘that’s expensive mate’) is about imposter syndrome and fluctuating self-worth, set against the backdrop of the Australian outback.
- Taking place simultaneously in the theatre and on the streets of Leeds, Ira Brand’s RUNNER is a performance about running and exhaustion that asks the question – why do we value people when they push themselves to their limits?
- 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 question if the way we produce our identities is all that different to how we put on a show.
- 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?
- Through the story of one family, the intimate, interactive installation Dear Laila from artist Basel Zaraa shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance. Experienced by one audience member at a time, Dear Laila uses the retelling of memories and tactile details to bring a now destroyed place to life.
NEED TO KNOW:
- View full progrramme
- Transform 25 takes place in Leeds from 21-25 October 2025.
