Brisbane Festival reveals 2026 program

Brisbane Festival has today unveiled its 2026 program – the inaugural vision of new Artistic Director Ebony Bott, and a bold, expansive celebration of art, community, and the city itself.

For decades now, Brisbane Festival has been the civic heart of the city – essential to its cultural identity and sense of place. Under the banner Switch On, Light Up, Come Alive, Bott’s debut program does exactly what it promises, igniting Brisbane’s streets, rivers, and stages with work that brings the world to this city, and this city to the world, from 4–26 September.

From the expansive Festival Village, South Bank to a dedicated early morning program that rises with one of the earliest waking cities on earth, this is a festival that moves to the rhythm of its people. Operating at first light to after dark, it is the only major arts festival in the country with a program that stretches across the full breadth of the day, from sunrise ceremonies and morning yoga to late-night performances and riverside drinks beneath the stars.

Bott’s first program at the helm commissions ambitious new Australian work, hosts acclaimed international productions, many exclusive to Brisbane, and throws open its doors to audiences of all ages through expansive free and low-cost programming, reasserting Brisbane as one of the great cultural destinations in the Asia-Pacific.

 

 

Highlights include the world premiere of Suzie Miller’s Strong is the New Pretty, sharing the untold story of how the AFLW was born; DIAVOLO’s visceral, adrenaline-fuelled ESCAPE; and Luke Murphy’s critically acclaimed Scorched Earth, fresh from New York’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, alongside a program that spans puppetry, circus, immersive theatre, live music, fireworks spectacle and so much more.

The festival’s opening weekend announces itself in spectacular fashion with the return of Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust on Saturday 5 September. One of Australia’s most breathtaking annual events, Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust lights up the Brisbane night sky and unites the city with a shimmering fireworks display launched from bridges, barges and rooftops around town, preceded by a thrilling RAAF flyover.

In introducing the 2026 program, Brisbane Festival Artistic Director Ebony Bott:

This year, Brisbane Festival is tuned to the frequency of this city – from first light through to after dark. It is a Festival shaped by Brisbane’s energy, outdoor life and sense of momentum and possibility, bringing extraordinary artists from Queensland, across Australia and around the world into theatres, parks, riverbanks and the Festival Village, South Bank.

Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust Minister for Education and the Arts, John-Paul Langbroek said Brisbane Festival 2026 will spotlight Queensland’s vibrant arts and cultural scene for three weeks during September.

 

 

Minister Langbroek:

Brisbane Festival 2026 will see the city come alive with an exciting program that showcases the extraordinary talent of Queensland artists alongside national and international creatives, with the program featuring 700 performances and over 2,000 artists and arts workers.

With free and ticketed events across the city, including the much-anticipated return of the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Brisbane Festival is a cultural highlight for locals and visitors alike.

The Crisafulli Government is proud to support Brisbane Festival, which delivers on our 10-year strategy, Queensland’s Time to Shine, delivering transformational arts and cultural experiences that will shape our state’s creative legacy as we prepare for Brisbane 2032 and beyond.

Minister for the Environment and Tourism, Andrew Powell MP :

Brisbane Festival cemented Queensland’s status as Australia’s premier events destination and a national leader in world-class experiences.

Brisbane Festival showcases the very best of our state while delivering more than $27 million into the economy, backing local businesses and proving Queensland leads the nation when it comes to major events.

Lord Mayor of Brisbane Adrian Schrinner added:

Brisbane Festival is back again, ready to light up our river and turn every corner of our city into a stage. From spectacular performances in iconic city spaces to hidden gems in neighbourhood venues, this year’s festival is packed with unforgettable experiences across Brisbane.

Brisbane continues to attract world-class events and bold artistic talent from around the globe while proudly backing local performers, businesses and communities that continue to help shape our reputation as Australia’s lifestyle capital.

We’re proud to support Brisbane Festival and the incredible opportunities it creates for our local artists and local economy. So grab your friends, plan your calendar and dive head first into this year’s program. There’s truly something for everyone.

FESTIVAL VILLAGE, SOUTH BANK

At the centre of this year’s program – literally and figuratively – stands the Festival Village, South Bank: a sweeping riverside takeover of the South Bank Cultural Forecourt. A direct nod to the Athlete’s Village and a statement of intent as Brisbane surges toward 2032, it is the beating heart of Brisbane Festival 2026, pulsing with free and ticketed activity all festival long.

The Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent makes its long-anticipated return as the jewel in the Village’s crown. Each evening it will be transformed into a working bar as the home of West End smash The Choir of Man, a raucous, roof-raising celebration of music and community that has taken audiences around the world by storm. Amongst many other live gigs and performances, the Spiegeltent will also host The Listies’ anarchic family show This Show is a Joke, and a unique collision of country music and opera in Are You Lonesome Tonight with arias and songs by Puccini, Verdi, Slim Dusty, Troy Cassar-Daly and Dolly Parton.

 

 

The outdoor Village Green buzzes across the festival’s three weeks – including an action-packed school holiday period – with Indigenous-led contemporary circus Living Sculptures: How the Birds Got Their Colours, dance workshops with the ABC’s Dance with Tom and Queensland Ballet, morning mantras with Camerata, sock puppet and circus workshops, weekday wellness sessions, a packed talks program and a rolling lineup of DJ sets and live music.

A field of microphones, a community-curated song list, and a subtle sound system that weaves individual voices into something unexpectedly beautiful: Giant Sing Along is an interactive installation by Montreal-based studio Daily tous les jours that invites festival-goers of all ages to add their voice to a live mass choir. Simple in concept and quietly transcendent in execution, it is the kind of spontaneous, feel-good moment that Brisbane Festival does best.

Global alcohol-free morning dance and wellness phenomenon DAYBREAKER comes to the Festival Village, South Bank this September, combining high-energy DJ sets, yoga, movement, and unexpected moments of play for a community experience that starts the day fully alive. Coffee over cocktails, connection over convention: whether you arrive with your crew or step in solo, DAYBREAKER is an invitation to dance, sweat and be present at daybreak.

As evening falls, the Festival Village, South Bank becomes the perfect vantage point for Bright Nights by ANZ, the festival’s nightly spectacular that transforms the Brisbane River into a choreographed canvas of floating fountains, waterscreens, lasers and water jets soaring up to 80 metres high, set to an exclusive soundtrack by The Veronicas. Commencing each evening with a Welcome to Country and a placemaking story by Traditional Owner Yuggera and Turrbal man Shannon Ruska, it is a nightly celebration of Brisbane and its landmark river – free, and running three times nightly throughout the festival.

 

 

HIGHLIGHTS

At the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Strong is the New Pretty arrives as one of the most anticipated world premieres of the festival. A co-production between Brisbane Festival, Sydney Theatre Company, and Trish Wadley Productions, the new work sees celebrated Australian playwright Suzie Miller – the force behind international phenomenon Prima Facie and sell-out smash RBG: Of Many, One – turn her extraordinary talents to the untold story of how the AFLW was born. From a 2010 report recommending a national women’s league to the seven grit-fuelled years it took to make it a reality, Miller brings to the stage the remarkable characters who took the league from a pipe dream to a sensation.

Visceral, high-octane, and genuinely breathtaking, ESCAPE is the latest production from Los Angeles company DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion. Moving architectural structures become the stage for elite athletic performance across dance, acrobatics, stunt work and circus arts, all brought to life through a pounding soundtrack spanning pop, EDM and rock. This is contemporary performance at its most physically and emotionally spectacular.

Fresh from a critically acclaimed US premiere at New York’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, Scorched Earth is the bold new work from Luke Murphy’s Attic Projects, creator of the multi-award-winning Volcano, a hit at Brisbane Festival 2024. Set in a stark interrogation room where the reopening of a twelve-year-old unsolved murder dredges up one of the darkest questions of the Irish psyche: what right do we have to the land beneath our feet, and what are we willing to do to keep it?

New York puppetry company Wakka Wakka presents Dead as Dodo, a mesmerising musical odyssey set deep in the underworld, where two skeleton friends, a Dodo and a boy, are thrown into chaos when the Dodo miraculously sprouts feathers and begins to transform. Infused with puppetry, humour, music and stunning visual effects, it is a wildly inventive tale of survival, transformation, and the power of friendship – and if The New York Times calling Wakka Wakka “possible geniuses” is anything to go by, not to be missed.

 

 

No One Gets Out of Here Alive from Gold Coast company The Farm transforms mortality into a visceral, darkly funny, and unexpectedly cathartic communal experience. Drawing on opera, ballet, dance, voice and music the work confronts not just the big D, but all the quiet everyday endings that shape a life. This is a work for all those who will die. It doesn’t need to be a funeral.

 

 

Making its Australian premiere under the big top at South Bank’s Piazza, Fijian Flying Circus is a dazzling, high-energy celebration of spirit, culture, and joy from internationally renowned Fijian dance tribe VOU (‘new’ in the iTaukei language). Follow curious young Loma and her hilarious sidekick Tui as they tumble into a mystical world of cheeky forest spirits, towering giants and elemental forces on a thrilling quest to reclaim her stolen enchanted shoe. Fusing unbelievable aerial acrobatics, gravity-defying stunts and laugh-out-loud storytelling, it is a magical, whole-of-family adventure packed with wonder, mischief and heart.

Exclusively at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company is an unmissable journey through the creative magic behind some of the most beloved characters in screen history, from Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy to the fantastical worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, and the irrepressible Fraggles of Fraggle Rock.

NEW ZEALAND CONNECTIONS

With the Brisbane-Gold Coast urban corridor home to the largest proportion of Pasifika peoples in Australia, Brisbane Festival has long held a deep and meaningful connection to Aotearoa. This year, the 2026 program honours that relationship with the staging of four uniquely New Zealand works.

Tiri: Te Araroa Woman Far Walking is a sweeping new adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s epic tale, directed by Katie Wolfe. Spanning 185 years of Aotearoa’s history and led by award-winning actors Miriama McDowell and Nī Dekkers-Reihana, it is a play for the whole whānau, a national treasure that celebrates wāhine Māori and continues to resonate across time and place.

 

 

Acclaimed choreographer Tupua Tigafua brings his delightfully mischievous dance work Shel We to town. Having entranced audiences across New Zealand and Sweden, this playful homage to Shel Silverstein (best known for the children’s book The Giving Tree as well as the Johnny Cash classic A Boy Named Sue) is a deeply felt tribute to family and the ties that bind.

Based on a story by Bill Manhire, Betsy Balloon and the Very Great Terrible Flood is a rambunctious modern fable about a girl from a balloon-factory island whose world quite literally pops, sending her to a rain-soaked city that is slowly, inexorably sinking. Presented as a staged reading with original music and illustration, it is the kind of story that is as funny as it is quietly devastating.

Rounding out the quartet is Binge Culture’s Werewolf, a gripping, darkly funny immersive immersive horror-comedy theatre show inspired by the classic game of social deduction. When a lycanthropy outbreak triggers a seven-day lockdown, a makeshift community must learn to trust each other, even as the atmosphere inside begins to turn. When night falls, who do you trust?

 

THEATRE & MUSIC

Taking theatre off stage and into the roller rink is Mama Does Derby, a boisterous, big-hearted story of a single mum and her teenage daughter starting over in a regional town where neither quite fits. Staged inside the Brisbane Powerhouse, this rollicking new work is told through theatre, live punk band and the sweaty, radical world of roller derby. From 2024 Scotsman First Fringe Award winner Virginia Gay (Calamity Jane) and director Clare Watson, it is irresistible Aussie theatre about falling down and getting back up.

Also at Brisbane Powerhouse, Bleachers is a visually striking new disability-led dance-theatre work by Sprung Dance Theatre – a collective of ten d/Deaf and disabled artists from Bundjalung Country – built around a custom bleacher set that becomes a living, shifting space where stories of loneliness, belonging and the human need to be part of something unfold.

Koreaboo sees actor and performer Michelle Lim Davidson (The Newsreader) make her playwriting debut in a heartfelt, funny story drawn from her own life — following a Korean-Australian woman whose reunion with her birth mother in Seoul proves far more complicated than anticipated — while LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches), described by The Guardian as “a giddy, witty journey into a phantasmagoric hell,” plunges two best friends into the Chinese afterlife for a rip-roaring examination of friendship and cultural inheritance.

 

 

Roma Street Parkland becomes the city’s ultimate seasonal stage as Night at the Parkland returns, bringing local and international artists together beneath the stars for a series of unforgettable outdoor concerts. This year’s line-up features soul legend Aloe Blacc, beloved ARIA Hall of Famers Human Nature, rock icons Icehouse, the Temper Trap, the Cruel Sea and Magic Dirt sharing a landmark double bill, Aussie darling Missy Higgins, electronic powerhouses PNAU, and the extraordinary Katie Noonan performing Jeff Buckley’s Grace in its entirety.

RocKwiz comes to Brisbane with a tailor-made celebration of the city’s extraordinary musical legacy – from the Bee Gees and The Saints to Savage Garden, The Veronicas, The Grates and the striped sunlight sound of The Go-Betweens. Hosted by Julia Zemiro and Brian Nankervis with the Orkestra, special guests, and punter contestants from the crowd, it is a live mixtape of trivia, breakout musical interludes and some fun and friendly competition.

FOR AND BY THE COMMUNITY

Brisbane Serenades is back, presenting a vibrant series of free outdoor concerts in parks, gardens and neighbourhoods across the city. This year’s program takes in Manly Serenades at George Clayton Park and St Lucia Serenades at the University of Queensland, with each event a distinct reflection of the community that calls it home. And the Moorooka Block Party chalks up five years with a 5-star lineup of live music, dance, workshops, family friendly activities and performance at Peggs Park.

The annual Quandamooka Festival returns as one of the highlights of the community calendar – a celebration of the living culture, art, and stories of the Quandamooka people of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), and one of the most significant First Nations cultural gatherings in Queensland.

The Common People Dance Eisteddfod – Brisbane’s most beloved dance battle of the ‘burbs – returns with seven southeast Queensland teams jazz-sliding, body-rolling, and high-kicking their way to glory; Community Choir: The Musical, now in its second season, is a heartwarming and hilarious tale performed almost entirely by locals; and the Alexander Ball, curated by the legendary Ella Ganza, reignites Brisbane’s Ballroom scene with a spectacular gathering of diverse walkers from across Australia and overseas.

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Season Details

Venue: Brisbane Festival
Date: 04- 26 Sep 2026