BLOOM 2026 Festival Will Come to Battersea Arts Centre With Five Experimental Productions

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) will present the third iteration of Bloom between 7 – 16 May. The festival offers a space for innovation, encouraging and supporting artists to make new work that experiments with form and ideas, supporting them to take risks to create bold and groundbreaking new art.

All developed at and supported by BAC, the programme features: Catherine Hoffmann employing warped music and searing text to take audiences on a visceral, absurdist ride through Breakdown Britain; a Gen Z TikToker teams up with Louise Orwin in a helter-skelter nosedive into The Almighty Algorithm; queer punk duo pink suits create an immersive performance of intimacy, pain, pleasure, and grief; part workshop, part party Stacy Makishi encourages audiences to consider community and celebrate the messy, imperfect parts we're often told to hide; and Tasmanian puppeteers Terrapin and UK-based artist Tim Spooner bring a post-human world to life in a unique collaboration.

BAC's Programme Producer Ella Gamble who has curated the 2026 programme said: “The UK theatre ecology is quietly losing the spaces where risk happens and mixed-bill nights, scratch platforms, and experimental festivals that once allowed unfinished, formally adventurous work to exist in public are becoming increasingly sparse across the UK. As funding pressures increase, these spaces are often first to be cut, creating a structural bottleneck that limits artistic development, narrows the pipeline of innovation, and reshapes what kinds of work get made.

These platforms tend to hold what traditional programming struggles to: short-form, in-progress, or uncategorisable work, giving artists room to test ideas, fail productively, and develop new forms in dialogue with audiences.

The impact is not just artistic but communal: fewer opportunities for connection, collaboration, and shared learning are contributing to a more isolated and less sustainable environment for artists. With Bloom, we're hoping to gently push back against this”

The full Bloom programme for 2026 is:

A unique collaboration between Tasmanian puppeteers Terrapin and UK-based artist Tim Spooner, Matter Era blends experimental puppetry with animated objects and materials to create an eco-system imagined entirely without people (7-9 May).

Catherine Hoffmann's Wormhole of our Formation - armed with a wind machine, Catherine Hoffmann uses warped music and searing text to immerse audiences in a surreal, transcendental point of collapse, charting a fragmented personal journey across the disorienting landscapes of austerity and ageing (8 – 9 May)

In Walking Each Other Home, Stacy Makishi invites audiences for a creative encounter exploring how we might build communities of connection: to ourselves, to each other, and to inspiration and mystery. Part workshop, part party, Stacy moves from sharing intimate stories and rituals to silly games and dance moves (9 May)

Enlisting the help of famous Gen Z TikToker Jax Valentine, award-winning cult performance artist Louise Orwin presents FAMEHUNGRY, a helter-skelter nosedive into The Almighty Algorithm using very real, very live TikTok experiences, asking what it means to be an artist in the relentless attention economy (15-16 May).

Performed to a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen Live, queer punk duo pink suits invite audiences to follow them in an immersive performance exploring intimacy, pain, pleasure and grief in Dance Me to the End of Love (16 May).