31/05/2026 Shanghai, Shanghai Art Theatre

1 human. 48,000 species. A gloriously absurd physical performance combining animal impressions, clowning, sound, projection and immersive technology, offering a bittersweet reflection on biodiversity loss and life in an age of extinction.

Created and performed by Tom Bailey, Wild Thing! is a sequel to Mechanimal’s acclaimed 2019 production Vigil. Following its premiere at Summerhall as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, the production embarked on a UK tour from Autumn 2025.

In this ambitious one-hour performance, Bailey attempts to embody 48,000 extinct and endangered species, bringing their extraordinary and often bizarre names to life through physical comedy, movement and imaginative animal impersonations. What begins as a hilariously unconventional challenge gradually unfolds into a more profound exploration of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Beneath its playful exterior lies a deeply moving meditation on extinction, loss and our responsibility towards the living world. Wild Thing! transforms an urgent environmental issue into an entertaining yet thought-provoking theatrical experience, reminding us of the extraordinary diversity of life on Earth — and how much we stand to lose.

30/05/2026 Shanghai, Shanghai Art Theatre

Zugunruhe: an ornithology term for ‘migratory restlessness in birds’. Zugunruhe explores the incredible flight of a marsh warbler, the world’s only bird whose song echoes its migration route. Body-compasses, magnetic fields, African sunsets, star-chasing, storm-riding, homing… in the context of human migration, Zugunruhe offers a wild, fresh look at animal migration.

Rehearsing among birds in the wetlands of Somerset, performer Tom Bailey creates a feast of bird behaviour alongside a digital sound map of the marsh warbler’s journey, made by composer Rowan Evans. The show premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018, where it received critical acclaim and a Herald Angel award.

31/10/2026 – 1/11/2026 – Shanghai, YOUNG Theatre
7/11/2026 – Beijing, Lao She Theatre

Brazilian Stage on Record is a showcase of four significant productions from Brazil, presented in Asia for the first time through filmed theatre performances. Part of the 2026 China-Brazil Year of Culture, the programme offers audiences an opportunity to explore the diversity, creativity and social relevance of contemporary Brazilian theatre.

Spanning themes of memory, identity, freedom, social inequality and resistance, the four productions bring distinct perspectives on Brazilian society and the human experience to the screen.

Through striking physical performances, powerful storytelling, music and innovative theatrical language, Brazilian Stage on Record brings the energy and pulse of Brazilian theatre to Asian audiences, creating a platform for international cultural exchange and dialogue.

Curated by: Jopa Moraes
Co-presented by: Performance Infinity
Special support: Guimarães Rosa Institute (IGR), Consulate General of the Federative Republic of Brazil in Shanghai

16–17/5/2026 Nantong, Nantong Grand Theatre
23–24/5/2026 Shenzhen, Antuoshan Public Cultural Centre Concert Hall

“Food is a gift. Something you give to others. A privilege. An excuse to be with the ones you love.” In Pepa’s childhood home in Peru, the rich flavours of traditional cooking were forbidden, except when her grandmother slipped in a steak and a handful of spices. Moving to England sent Pepa on a journey inward, where she discovered that food could be shared with a new family around a new table. Written and performed by Peruvian artist Pepa Duarte and directed by Sergio Maggiolo, Eating Myself turns the stage into a Peruvian kitchen. A traditional soup is cooked live throughout the performance, and its aroma fills the auditorium.

Combining storytelling, physical theatre, music and real cooking, this solo show explores womanhood, body image, diet culture and cultural identity. It places the experiences of grandmother, mother and daughter side by side, with no villains and no romanticising. It offers no easy answers about making peace with food. Instead, it honestly shows the push and pull between control and desire. The performance ends with the audience sharing the freshly made soup, a full sensory experience hailed by The Guardian for its “overt and audacious theatricality.”

16/5/2026-17 Shanghai, Daning Theatre (2026 Shanghai Jing’an Theatre Festival)

Happy Days is one of Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated plays. This new production by Brazil’s Armazém Companhia de Teatro, directed by co-founder Paulo de Moraes, presents it as a pared-back, highly concentrated survival monologue poised between absurdity and endurance. Buried in a mound of earth, first up to her waist and then up to her neck, Winnie still wakes each day to the sound of a bell. She brushes her teeth, puts on lipstick, talks, remembers and sings. Beside her are the near-silent Willie and a bag holding everything she has against the void: a toothbrush, a mirror, lipstick and a revolver. “Another happy day,” she insists.

Armazém builds the work through a minimal stage, striking imagery, precise rhythm and Beckett’s dark humour, creating an atmosphere that sits between tragedy and comedy. Winnie’s optimism is both sincere and unsettling, and her fragility and despair keep showing through the laughter. The result is a portrait of time, companionship and the will to go on. Seen today, the play’s barren, sun-scorched landscape also echoes climate change and ecological crisis, placing one woman’s predicament in a wider contemporary context. Presented in 2026 to mark the 120th anniversary of Beckett’s birth, the production was performed in Portuguese with Chinese and English surtitles and marked its China premiere.

2/5/2026 – 4/5/2026 – Aranya, Aranya Theater A
12/09/2026 – 13/09/2026  – Shanghai, Shanghai International Dance Centre

In Du Bout Des Doigts, Belgian artists Gabriella Iacono and Grégory Grosjean turn their fingertips into dancers and miniature sets into entire worlds. A man and a woman dance together through time, living through some of the world’s greatest events, as iconic 20th-century dance pieces are reimagined on a miniature scale. Every movement is filmed in real time and projected onto a large screen. The performance combines live cinema, choreography, theatre, photography and visual art in a mesmerising dialogue between the intimate and the epic. Through the lens of the camera, the dancers revisit landmark moments in dance history: ballet, lindy hop, musicals, rock, contemporary dance and hip hop, along with nods to Pina Bausch and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. They stride across famous scenes from Broadway to Paris and from Brussels to Harlem.

As we follow their odyssey through the decades, the couple falls in love, argues, ignores and rebels against each other, plays, and above all dances together. In doing so, the work explores love, memory and the passage of life. Entirely wordless, the performance opens up the richness of choreographic expression to audiences of all ages, including those new to contemporary dance, and gives free rein to the imagination. Du Bout Des Doigts is a breathtaking celebration of dance, storytelling and cinematic imagination, told at the scale of a fingertip.

Two black-and-white film characters are trapped inside an endlessly looping silent movie. Every day they repeat the same actions, the same rhythm and the same story: one runs, one waits, one keeps trying, one keeps failing. Beyond the screen lies another world, full of colour, music and the sound of wind across the sand. So they begin searching for a way out. They try, fail, and try again, and gradually the unbreakable rules of their world start to loosen and its borders begin to crack. Created by Dutch company Helena.and.Goos, Vrij (FREE) blends silent-film comedy, clowning, physical theatre and live music into a story about escape and freedom.

Rather than telling us what freedom is, Vrij turns to the small, everyday moments of life: routines that hem us in, relationships that replay themselves, and the moments when we try once more even though we know the outcome. Its characters are pulled back to where they started again and again, yet they never stop moving forward. Directors and performers Helena Bittencourt and Goos Meeuwsen have collaborated with Cirque du Soleil and Compagnia Finzi Pasca and have toured across Europe and the Americas. Here they let laughter and absurdity sit side by side as they explore love, fear, habit and change. Perhaps freedom is not a final destination, but the courage to set out again and again.

25/06/2026 – 27/06/2026 2026 Aranya Theatre Festival

How long does it take for a grain of sand to become a mountain? In Er rent een berg voorbij (A Mountain Runs By), the answer is 4.54 billion years. Forests crawl across the stage, mountains crumble into beaches, coastlines appear in an instant, and the moon waltzes with the sea. Created by Plankton, the Dutch-Belgian visual theatre duo of Sonja van Ojen and Hendrik Kegels, and produced by Feikes Huis, this wordless production condenses the entire history of the Earth into about an hour. Oceans are born, continents drift, volcanoes erupt and plants slowly cover the barren land, giving deep time a shape we can see.

There are no elaborate technical effects. Instead, four performers use their voices, bodies and imagination, together with cardboard cut-outs, handmade landscapes, light and live sound, to bring ordinary materials to life. A sheet of paper, a wooden board or a beam of light can become an ocean, a rock or a mountain range. In this almost “non-human” history, humankind is not the protagonist but a fleeting moment, tiny yet capable of reshaping the planet. Poetic, playful and full of wonder for all ages, Er rent een berg voorbij connects vast geological time with today’s ecological questions. It reminds us that we are only brief visitors on a planet whose story is far longer than our own.

27/06/2026 – 28/06/2026, 2026 Aranya Theater Festival

How was love born? Why do we keep searching for it, again and again, even when we know some stories will never have an ending? Created by Barcelona-based Agrupación Señor Serrano, winner of the Silver Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, History of Love (Historia del amor) features a single performer taking on the impossible task of understanding why we love, and why we love the way we do. The piece unfolds through a double dramaturgy. It traces how love has been imagined across history, from a prehistoric cave to a trendy Barcelona restaurant, and sets this against the performer’s own experience of love today, leaving us to ask whether her stories are truly hers or ours. Running through it all is the myth of El Dorado, the city of gold hidden deep in the jungle that no one ever reached. Like the promise of love, it has been rewritten and reshaped across the ages, yet it remains one of the great driving forces of human existence.

The stage is a space halfway between an archive, a laboratory and a landfill, filled with the objects, remnants and debris left behind by millennia of love stories. Like both narrator and researcher, the performer finds, manipulates and dissects these traces through powerful monologues and an intense physical score. Live cameras magnify the smallest gestures and textures into vast projected landscapes, layering memory, myth and reality. Weaving together live video, objects, performance and physical theatre, the piece builds itself before the audience’s eyes. Rather than offering answers, History of Love holds up a mirror to our own ideas, frustrations and desires, revealing love not as a single linear truth but as a complex, ever-changing territory. Premiered at the GREC Festival in Barcelona in July 2025.

22/06/2026 – 24/06/2026 2026 Aranya Theatre Festival

One performer, one guitar, one microphone, fourteen songs. In this minimalist yet daring adaptation, Dublin-born artist, musician and writer Rob McGlade takes Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy apart and rebuilds it as a one-man musical. Working directly from the original text, he cuts and collages its most famous lines and soliloquies, from “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs” to “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”, into fourteen songs. The language keeps its poetic power while gaining new rhythm and emotional flow through music. There is no balcony, no ballroom and no streets of Verona. Instead, a single body shifts between Romeo’s passion, Juliet’s purity, Mercutio’s wit and Capulet’s authority, giving the familiar story the intimacy of an inner monologue.

Condensed to around an hour, the piece strips back the family feud and social structures to focus on the lovers’ meeting, longing and loss. The music is both expression and structure. It moves from brooding darkness through the tension of conflict to the fragile tenderness of Juliet’s soliloquies, while the guitar gives the work the air of a wandering troubadour retelling a love myth sung across the centuries. Sitting somewhere between theatre, concert and recitation, Romeo & Juliet: One-Man Musical asks how love survives when language becomes music and only one storyteller remains. Perhaps love never belonged to the two people on stage, but to the single voice that tells their story.