25–27/06/2026 Aranya Dionysus Theatre

Who is Q? Some say he is a truck driver, some say a dreamer, and others think he is simply someone who refuses to bow to reality. More than four hundred years ago, Cervantes wrote of a man who read so many tales of chivalry that he set off on a scrawny horse to save the world, mistaking windmills for giants and inns for castles. The windmills are still here. Today, though, people drive instead of ride, wear everyday clothes instead of armour, and yet still believe, at certain moments, in things others call impossible. Created by director Sarah Moeremans and writer Joachim Robbrecht for Het Zuidelijk Toneel, one of the Netherlands’ leading theatre companies, Not Quichot does not retell Cervantes’ novel. It takes a free and daring detour from it. Don Quixote’s shadow hovers throughout but never quite appears. In his place is Q, a man of our time who keeps moving forward and keeps believing in imagination, even knowing reality will not easily change.

Six performers gather like old friends swapping stories, building Q’s road-trip life line by line until it grows ever more outlandish. A car park becomes the sea, a van becomes the horizon, and an ordinary day can suddenly veer somewhere unexpected. Blending live music, performance and playful collective storytelling, the actors are both characters and narrators, creating and dismantling the story as they go and leading the audience back and forth between truth and fiction. At times it feels like a road movie, at times like pub talk, at times like a strange late-night thought: absurd, funny and surprisingly sincere. Beneath the laughter lies a question as old as Don Quixote itself. When reality keeps telling us what is impossible, do we still have the courage to believe in another possibility? Perhaps Q is not Don Quixote, but everyone who refuses to give in completely to reality carries a little of him inside.

19/07/2026 – 31/08/2026 Aranya, Phase 7 Beach (Asia premiere)

FIREBIRD is a monumental concert experience and otherworldly light show. It is an epic adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 Firebird Suite, performed by an orchestra made entirely of recycled car tail lights. Created by Amsterdam-based collective Touki Delphine (Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest, Chris Doyle and John van Oostrum), the work transforms music into light: each musical voice is reimagined as a luminous signal, turning the score into a living, pulsing choreography that surrounds the audience. Weaving jazz, avant-garde, electronic and pop influences into Stravinsky’s original movements, it asks what this century-old classic might sound like today. There are no performers on stage. As the collective puts it, “humans must take a step back,” leaving the lights to dance like creatures from the future and inviting every viewer to see their own Firebird, whether a bustling city, a natural landscape, an emotion or a memory.

For its Asia premiere, co-produced with Aranya Theater, FIREBIRD was rebuilt from scratch with more than 500 tail lights. They were collected over several months from vehicle scrapyards in Beidaihe, Changli, Tangshan, Huludao and Jinzhou, then tested and assembled during 18 days of on-site creation by the Dutch and American team. Set on Aranya’s beach, the work invites audiences to walk through the community in silver capes to a stage open to the sea breeze and tides, where even the soft clicking of the relays becomes part of the soundscape. Just as Stravinsky reinvented his 1910 ballet as the 1919 suite, and just as the Firebird rises from its own ashes, these discarded fragments of the industrial age are given new life. Blending myth, industry and technology, FIREBIRD is a contemporary fable about renewal, imagination and the power of reinvention.

25–26/11/2026 Shanghai, Shanghai Jasmine Theatre
28–29/11/2026 Nantong, Nantong Grand Theatre
6/12/2026  Guangzhou, Canton Tower Theatre, as part of GBA Culture and Arts Festival

‘Profoundly moving’ — BBC Radio 4

Since its 2017 premiere, The Nature of Forgetting has moved audiences from New York to Seoul, São Paulo to Shanghai, and played to sold-out houses across the US, China and beyond; establishing itself as one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of the past decade.

Following more than 200 performances worldwide, Theatre Re brings its explosive, powerful and joyous piece about what is left when memory is gone to China as part of its landmark 10th Anniversary Season.

Tom is living with young onset dementia. We meet him as he prepares for his 55th birthday party and past memories come flooding back. Developed with Neuroscience Professor Kate Jeffery and the Alzheimer’s Society, The Nature of Forgetting is a life-affirming journey into a weakening mind, where fragmented does not have to mean defeated.

As one of the UK’s leading visual theatre companies, Theatre Re combines original live music with striking visual performance to create deeply moving, non-verbal theatre about universal human challenges and the fragility of life.