Perform Sharjah Returns for Its Fifth Edition With 16 Free Performances

Dance, puppets, audience-made theatre and a lot of free tickets

Sharjah's performance season is officially back. Perform Sharjah, the performance programme of Sharjah Art Foundation, opened its fifth edition on 11 October with 16 performances running until 29 November 2026, eight of them world premieres and seven regional premieres. Best of all, every performance is free.

For anyone less familiar with it, Sharjah Art Foundation was established in 2009 to expand the programmes of the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, and it has since become one of the most important art institutions in the MENA region, led by its President and Director, Hoor Al Qasimi. Its performance programme followed in 2022, with a first season that opened with Ahmed El Attar's Every Brilliant Thing and Joe Namy's Automobile 9. This year's edition, according to the foundation, "approaches the body as a site of artistic inquiry, moving between participation and observation, intimate reflection and collective experience".

The festival opened with Tunisian dancer Mohamed Toukabri's solo Every-Body-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday (2025), which blends hip-hop and street dance with contemporary choreography. Next up, on 18 October, British playwright Nathan Ellis brings work.txt to the Poetry House, a play performed entirely by its audience that, as The National notes, has been staged in nine countries and 11 languages since its London premiere in 2019. Then on 25 October, Mallika Taneja's Do You Know This Song? weaves song and storytelling with a harmonium and a microphone.

One of the highlights is sure to be Us (2026) by Maria Hassabi, in which five dancers move around a six-metre bench. Co-presented with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation with partners including BOZAR, the Festival d'Automne à Paris and the Walker Art Center, it premiered in Brussels this year and arrives at the Cultural Palace in Al Falaj on 31 October.

Perhaps the most significant part of the programme for our region is Perhaps Here, which returns from 6 to 8 November with new site-specific works at Bait Al Serkal, a nineteenth-century heritage house in the Arts Square. Its artists include Jumairy, Kinda El Atrach, Mohammad Masharqa, Safa Baluchi, Sofiane Ouissi, Hend Elbalouty, and Hatem Miladi with Khaoula El Hadef. According to The National, the works deal with memory and grief.

Families, meanwhile, should not miss Sebastian Mayer's Hannibaby and Zarafa on 13 and 15 November, with life-size puppets of a baby elephant and a giraffe. Interestingly, Zarafa retraces the journey of the giraffe that Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt gave to the French king Charles X in 1827, which walked from Marseille to Paris. There are mask-making workshops, too.

The season closes with two moving works at the Khalid Bin Mohammed School in Al Mureijah Square: Sim Chi Yin's Longings, Returns (22 November), about the deportation of more than 30,000 people from British-ruled Malaya to China between 1948 and 1960, which also pays homage to Etel Adnan's To Be in a Time of War, and Sofiane Chalal's XXL (29 November), a joyful hip-hop piece about bodies that do not fit the norm.

So, what can we take away from this? In just five editions, Perform Sharjah has become one of the most generous performance programmes in the region, bringing international premieres to Sharjah for free while making room for artists from our region to make new work. We can't wait to see what Perhaps Here has in store.

Perform Sharjah runs at venues across Sharjah until 29 November 2026. All performances are free, with booking through Sharjah Art Foundation.

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