Celebrating 100 years of the V&A’s Theatre and Performance collection, this year’s Performance Festival explores the theme ‘remastered’ with a thrilling ten-day programme celebrating theatre and performance in all its forms. Through a range of special free and ticketed events – live performances, talks, tours, screenings, workshops, and more – ‘Remastered’ invites audiences to explore the beauty of transformation; from making anew, to remixing the past, and inspiring the future.

Highlights from the programme include dance company Thick and Tight who will stage Unearthly – a brand new performance piece that reexamines the colour blue in the V&A’s collection through a queer lens. Artist Sudha Bhuchar will present a solo show Evening Conversations, part of an initiative to set up a British South Asian Theatre Archive, and on Sunday 28th April a special panel talk will take place to celebrate the anniversary of East is East, reuniting the director, designer and one of the actors from the original production.

Throughout the festival audiences can enjoy screenings from the National Video Archive of Performance, including a groundbreaking all-female performance of Julius Ceasar (Donmar Warehouse, 2013), a theatrical double bill showing two interpretations of Caryl Churchill’s play A Number – 2002’s production (Royal Court) starring Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig and the 2022 production (Old Vic) with Lennie James and Paapa Essiedu, and an interactive family-friendly screening of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, plus more. There will also be a series of workshops and talks on puppetry, life-drawing, songwriting, South Asian theatre, Shakespeare, and the famous JW Anderson cardigan worn by Harry Styles.

This year V&A South Kensington also celebrates the centenary of its Theatre and Performance collections. In 1924, the museum accepted a donation of over 80,000 playbills, programmes, and ephemera from Gabrielle Enthoven, kicking off the museum’s collecting of theatre and performance which has since evolved into the internationally renowned and recognised National Collection of Performing Arts. To mark this anniversary, the Theatre and Performance galleries will host a special display, Enthoven Unboxed: 100 Years of Collecting Performance, set to open this summer, along with a newly refreshed permanent gallery space.

For more information on the Performance Festival 2024 please see the full programme here.