Launching Transform 25

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. Opening the festival with her epic solo performance Rinse, Australian performer and choreographer Amrita Hepi muses ‘why is it, when something is about to end, we begin to want to save it?’. In a global moment that feels increasingly fragmented and urgent, 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.

Transform 25 is full of audacious stories, joyful irreverence and sometimes dark realities. 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. The festival invites us to reflect on urgent questions – like how we find ways to value ourselves even if society doesn’t in EXXY by Dan Daw Creative Projects; and why it is that we only seem to value people when they’re pushing themselves to their limits in Ira Brand’s RUNNER. Basel Zaraa’s work Dear Laila asks audiences to consider both far reaching and intimate stories of war and displacement; The Last Supper by MEXA creates space for powerful solidarity and asks who will tell the stories of those who are silenced.

Ten years into Transform being established and our sixth international festival, Transform 25 also offers the opportunity to look to the future of the festival itself. Each of our last six festivals has taken a different shape and format, informed by its context at the time. From that very first independent edition in 2016, which required so much persuasion and belief; to the 2019 festival that took place across a TV studio and warehouse whilst venues were in transition; to the extended edition that saw flexible, outdoor programming within the pandemic; and finally, the ambitious and co-created Transform 23, delivered in the context of a Year of Culture. The nature of festivals is that they are fleet of foot, porous and adaptable. Transform 25 has been created within a constellation of different contexts, and it’s a festival that’s required belief, determination and entrepreneurialism like no other edition before it to pull off. It’s a festival that’s prioritised partnership and solidarity at every level, and it’s thanks to the extraordinary range of collaborators and partners in Leeds and beyond who have been open to working in fresh and new ways, that Transform 25 has been possible.

During the process of putting together this festival, at many times we asked, during times of such extraordinary challenges, what could performance, theatre and an international festival possibly do to create any change or offer any solutions? But each time we asked ourselves, it became clearer that 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 autumn.

We look forward to you being part of it – see you in October.

With love,

Amy Letman, Creative Director