Battersea Arts Centre Unveils 2026 Spring Lineup

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) has announced its 2026 spring season, a celebration of extraordinary performance and radical, socially conscious new work. The international programme for the next eight months includes four UK and World Premieres, two festivals and two building takeovers.

This season, the productions look through different lenses at how we live alongside each other, exploring desire, intimacy and connection in ambitious and provocative ways, playing with both form and sentiment. Offering its platform to a diverse range of creative and curatorial voices, freedom of artistic form and expression continues to lie at the heart of BAC's work.  Artists at all stages of their careers are represented, from centring young people with Homegrown, to presenting world-renowned artists making work about experiences both deeply specific and yet universally connected.

Pelin Başaran, Creative Director of Battersea Arts Centre says:
“This season brings together bold, radical work that engages with the world as it is: complex, political, playful and alive. The programme speaks directly to communities and voices that are often marginalized, creating a season that is energising, provocative and unafraid to take risks. It invites audiences to consider what connects us, what we desire, and how we nurture one another in the imagining of alternative world.

BAC is uniquely placed in London where you can encounter boundary-pushing work year-round, with artists who actively experiment with form and challenge norms. The strong international presence across the season signals what's to come. It reflects our commitment to being a year-round home for international work in the capital and lays the foundations for LIFT in the years ahead.”

Tarek Iskander, Artistic Director and CEO of Battersea Arts Centre says:
“BAC has always been a place where artists are trusted to take risks — with ideas, form and the questions they're asking of the world. This season reflects that spirit, from work originated and developed here in our building on Lavender Hill, to artists from across the world coming through our doors. That belief in creative freedom goes hand in hand with our commitment to widening access with Pay What You Can tickets, so that ambitious, exceptional art and performance can be experienced by as many people as possible.”

The previously announced A Public Address will open the season, taking over BAC for a month. Part of Wandsworth's year as the Mayor's London Borough of Culture, it sees award-winning Manchester theatre collective Quarantine collaborate with a huge range of people across Lavender Hill and the wider borough, offering audiences a rare insight into other people's lives and how they see the world. A Public Address brings together four works from Quarantine, including the World Premiere of a new two-part work created especially for BAC: Why I Am and Why I Am Not. In the first part, The Balcony, 12 people will make a speech to the public from the balcony of BAC's building – tackling subjects from the personal to the universal, the flippant to the urgent. The next day, these same 12 will appear inside BAC for The Rooms, a living installation of people in private conversation. Quarantine will also present the London premiere of 12 Last Songs - an epic 12-hour durational work that invites people from across Wandsworth to work a paid shift on stage in an exploration of the place work has in our lives. Across the two weeks, audiences can also experience the London premiere of The People of Lavender Hill, an audio walk in which audiences can listen to a portrait of those who live and work on Lavender Hill itself. Finally, in cafes within a one-mile radius of BAC, Quarantine brings its oldest and most intimate work to Wandsworth - No Such Thing is a one-to-one encounter, a conversation between two people guided by a menu of questions. (16 February - 14 March).

In March, Italian creative duo Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo present The Present is Not Enough, inspired by cruising as a social and communal practice. Archival material, movement and an immersive soundscape reimagine the city as a space that can be open, intimate, and safe. Personal archives that trace creators Silvia and Ilenia's relationship are woven together with the lives of their peers in the queer resistance movement of New York in the 70s and 80s. In this intimate and evocative work, Calderoni and Caleo shift between memory and longing to ask how past intimacies, collective living and unresolved struggles might help us imagine a shared, more inclusive future (26 - 27 March).

The World Premiere of BAC Production Second Trimester opens in April, by Trans performance artist, Krishna Istha, and their mother, Geetha Shankar. With direction by Milli Bhatia (seven methods of killing Kylie Jenner, speed, king troll), this ambitious new show explores multi-generational pregnancy stories, loss, gender and the weight of inherited memories in a cinematic, Bollywood-inspired epic family saga. Following First Trimester (2023), Krishna takes to the stage with Geetha to tell their story and take back control of their narrative. This is the first BAC Production as part of Making Waves, a national commissioning and  touring programmed supported by Arts Council England which will see two new BAC Productions tour the UK across 2026 and 2027. Tour details for Second Trimester will be announced in due course (14 – 25 April).

Weaving shared experiences of war, migration, resilience and identity, Pablo Lilienfeld and Federico Vladimir bring the UK Premiere of Monica, reimagining maternal legacies through a queer, non-traditional lens. Offering a striking theatrical tribute to kinship and memory, they study the intersection of their mothers' journeys, following their parallel migrations from Argentina to Spain. Using archival visuals of Pablo's late mother Monica's paintings, and erotic photographs of Fede's mother Monica taken by his father in the 80's, the pair reconstruct both stories through dance, music drag and cabaret (1-2 May).

In an exciting new partnership with Kaaitheatre (Brussels), BAC expands their Open Research programme with a curated series of talks, workshops and performances exploring mothering, family, and care beyond the norm. How To Be Many Mothers? is an ongoing artistic research programme developed by Kaaitheater's Co-artistic Coordinator Barbara Van Lindt. It encourages public voices and performative work that expand traditional views on motherhood and mothering. Co-presented by BAC and Kaaitheatre. Programme includes Second Trimester and Monica with full line-up to be announced. (20 April – 2 May).

Bloom returns in 2026 for its third edition, presenting genre-defying work developed at BAC. Experimenting with form, discipline and ideas, the curated programme reflects a commitment to platforming cutting-edge performance and supporting the risk-taking artists creating them. The programme for 2026, curated by BAC's Programme Producer Ella Gamble, includes:

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).

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).

Daniel Kok and Luke George present the UK Premiere of Bunny, a unique performance which uses the physical properties of rope and knots to explore the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and connection, with invited audience participation. Reverberating with sensuality, Bunny unravels lines of connection, suspending tension and unleashing collective desire. Part of Queer East Festival 2026 (4 – 6 June).

The long-awaited UK Premiere of Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf takes over BAC for six weeks following presentations at RISING Festival in Melbourne and Brisbane Powerhouse. An art exhibition masquerading as a mini golf course, it features nine interactive golf hole artworks devised by leading female artists from around the world. Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf explores the game's subversive history - invented by 19th century Scottish women who were banned from ‘real' courses but refused to sit on the sidelines. Artworks by: artist, filmmaker and writer Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know, All Fours) who goes “All Fores” for the project; Kaylene Whiskey, who weaves pop icons through traditional Anangu culture; Tokyo's Japan's Saeborg bringing latex creatures with a cartoonish menace; Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas squaring the circle; Minahasan artist Natasha Tontey entwining speculative storytelling through mythology, technology, and alternative histories; Atlanta rapper BKTHERULA who collaborates with sound artist Kate Miller to make swamp flowers bloom; Australian experimental film duo Soda Jerk opening an algorithmic K-hole; and prolific Hobart-based photographer and artist Pat Brassington going in headfirst. A new artist commission for the ninth hole is still to be announced. Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf is a RISING Melbourne Exhibition. Commissioned by RISING. Curated by Grace Herbert. Tickets will be released in March. (17 June – 26 July).