Alternative Roots 2026 announces line-up

Alternative Roots 2026

A day-long festival opening from 12:00 till 22:00. The festival pass provides access to all programme events. You are welcome to leave and re-enter the venue.

Detailed schedule to be announced.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW: https://www.kakilang.org.uk/2026-festival-alternative-roots

Full Line-up

Live Arts

angela wai nok hui · Megumi Ohata with Yuki Kyobu & Momose Yasunaga · Zhou Ning · Xuyi Zhu · Pei Kuo 郭珮 · William Shiu · Yifan He 何伊凡 · Bevis Wu · Max Percy + Shirly · Mild Peril · Xuanni_Space

Exhibition: ME / WE

KooNg · Amy Hsu Tzu Chen · Shao-Jie Lin · Yang-En Hume (curated by Hsin-Yi Huang & Alice Luo)

Film

Yarli Allison · Yasmine Anlan Huang · Tsz Kei (Jasmine) Mok · Cetus Kuo 郭敬耘

Workshops & Talks

Annie Pui Ling Lok · Chán Magazine (Dot Zhihan Jia, Jiaying Kou) · Takuya Watanabe · Yu’an Huang

Marketplace

Ashni Wilson · GlassSubterra and more

Food vendors to be announced; please follow our social media channels for updates.

Live Arts

I am in paradise by angela wai nok hui

I am happily in paradise mode right now!

’I am in paradise’ is a new work within my ongoing research into death and love. I do not know anyone who has been in paradise yet… I guess you will need to die before getting in right? for sure, I fantasise about it a lot.
Exploring and questioning life by using different visual language and sonic elements to traumatise and challenge the idea of life.

I feel loved.

白昼夢 – A Daydream: Stage II by Megumi Ohata with Yuki Kyobu and Momose Yasunaga

白昼夢 – A Daydream: Stage II begins from the conceptual space opened by the body after the shedding and transformation in Stage I. The artificial skin work ‘Haori’ remains central, while the focus shifts from moulting itself towards self-recognition, perception, and emotion. Through mirrors, touch, prosthetics, and embodied movement, the work asks how an altered body recognises itself, what it perceives itself to be, and how it recognises what it feels. Rather than resolving the body into a new identity, Stage II remains within uncertainty, exploring the unstable relationship between bodily appearance, self-recognition, and emotion. Developed collaboratively with performance artist Yuki Kyobu, the work draws on elements of his practice rooted in Jintai-koukyō-geki (translation: Human Body Symphony Drama), alongside an embodied approach informed by his resonance with butoh. Sound by Momose Yasunaga contributes to the changing emotional and bodily landscape of the performance.

Content warning: includes prosthetic makeup and artificial skin imagery

This Time is Different by Zhou Ning

This Time is Different is a one-hour solo comedy show by Zhou Ning, mixing stand-up, live music, magic tricks and storytelling. The show follows a loose emotional journey through love, shame, queerness, family, immigration, emotional patterns she keeps repeating, relationships that almost worked out, leftover food she microwaves, and a driving licence that never quite happens.

Bringing together Ning’s background in visual art, music and comedy, This Time is Different turns intimate personal experiences into moments that are emotionally honest and absurdly funny. It is a sincere, playful and slightly awkward show, carrying a quiet sense of hope.

Content warning: contains references to trauma, strong language, and adult themes

The Surveillance Monster by Xuyi Zhu

The Surveillance Monster explores how surveillance systems enter everyday life disguised as safety and care. A choreographed performance with a wearable inflatable creature, the project exaggerates invisible systems of control, questioning how surveillance becomes normalised through familiarity and everyday participation. Initially crouched and inactive, the Monster appears to be part of the venue’s monitoring equipment. At a designated moment, it activates and begins patrolling the space. Its movements imitate a surveillance camera: panning, tilting, pausing, locking onto points and rotating to adjust its view. Walking with a stiff, mechanical rhythm among the audience, it occasionally stops to track or observe individuals, while its mirrored surface reflects them back at themselves.

Butterfly Hickey: UNFOLDED by Pei Kuo 郭珮

Butterfly Hickey: UNFOLDED is a transdisciplinary performance and ongoing research. The work explores queer joy and reclaiming violence, walking between the lines of pain and pleasure. Deconstructing the Chinese classical dance hand gesture “蝶姿” (Butterfly stance), the title reveal a physical research that attempts to queer Chinese classical dance through sapphic erotic intentions, turning the imperial and nationalistic dance into an intimate space for marginalised voices to exist.

The soundtrack of the performance is built with excerpts of several interviews that Pei have conducted with queer migrants and diaspora in Amsterdam. These interviews dove deep into personal sexual experience, from stories of eating girls out in a nightclub to insights into East Asian touch deprivation. Electronic music composer Ping-en Hung texturises the space with symbols of lesbian joy: sound of butterfly wings fluttering, scissors snapping, girls moaning and breathing, charging the room with the sound of a wet dream.

Content warning: sexual content, nudity, self harm, mentioning of sexual assault, dim light, close proximity to audience

Poo-Wee-Pee by William Shiu

Poo-Wee-Pee is a transdisciplinary sound project bridging tabletop object performance, contemporary musical composition, choreography, and kinetic animation. The project aims to deconstruct the cultural taboos surrounding fundamental human biological functions—pooping, peeing, and farting. While these daily actions are essential indicators of bodily health and vital existence, Western cultural paradigms consistently relegate them to spaces of disgust, shame, and silence. By bringing the hidden, microscopic, and acoustic phenomena of the toilet into a public, immersive sonic space, Poo-Wee-Pee breaks down this invisible cultural wall. The project treats these everyday acts with a duality of tone: deeply hilarious yet profoundly serious, celebrating the simple blessing of a smoothly functioning body through advanced spatial audio and object interaction.

Content warning: Toilet-related imagery and objects.

14.44 by Yifan He 何伊凡

Based around two cardboard fountains, 14.44 quenches thirsts and asks for wetness back. Two performers engage in a constant fight for fourteen minutes and forty-four seconds over control of the pedal; the loser drinks the water squirted from the fountain. The durational grunts, thrusts, water splashing, spitting, and swallowing are an initiation to step into the contesting state of intimacy with and without trust, power-play, referencing queer sxxx and the angel number for new beginnings.

Re-Travel / Soul Retrieval by Bevis Wu

Green. A mark of fright, drawn around my mouth.

Green. A sign of flight. Leaving the body a fragile, hollow house.

Re-Travel / Soul Retrieval reinterprets the traditional Taiwanese "Siu-Kiann" (soul-recalling) ritual through a contemporary lens of self-displacement. The piece transforms the spiritual act of soul-recalling into a physical struggle against over-protection, engaging with the concept of directly facing the unknown. In this performance, Bevis Wu attempts to clean the green from the flesh, echoing the effects of the "Siu-Kiann" ritual. By witnessing this, the audience is invited to feel the suffocating weight of protection, revealing how an obsessive need for cleanliness distorts the physical body.

Content warning: involves themes of physical restraint and suffocation

smile b*tch by Max Percy + Shirly

The curving of the eyes into sweet half moons. The complete disappearance of the whites. A cupped hand hovering just in front of the mouth. The English word for ‘laughter’ does not encapsulate the abundance of ways that laughter is expressed in Asian societies; nor the various social readings that they impart. The way we LOL can make us feel right at home, to be truly relaxed in our own bodies. Laughter can also show unfamiliarity and create distance. Inspired by Yue Minjun’s iconic laughing man, smile b*tch is an artistic enquiry into what’s beneath a smile. It reclaims this laugh in a way that is ironically self aware, producing a confronting and hilarious multi-media work.

Inside the Mind of Fu Manchu by Mild Peril

This piece is a mix of drag and stand-up in character as Fu Manchu, exploring the racist and colonial origins of this figure, anti-Chinese stereotypes, and historical and contemporary uses of yellowface.

Content warning: discussions of racism and colonialism

Xuanni_Space

Xuanni_Space is a London-based Cantonese noise artist, composer, and producer and has been active in the southern Chinese underground music scene since 2013. Starting from free improvisation with violin, her setup has evolved over the years into a Digitakt, a no-input mixer, and a Nintendo 3DSrunning DSN-12 that lays in acidmelodies. She feeds signals into the mixer to generate feedback, letting unstable loops produce patterns she couldn't have planned. Her live sets collapse rave energy and noise into the same moment. "Space's performances are an antidote to awkward experimental music nights… It becomes an immediate and dangerous pleasure."

Exhibition

ME / WE

KOONG • Amy Hsu Tzu Chen • Shao-Jie Lin • Yang-En Hume

What is the position of ME and WE today?

Much of public life is spent deciding who “we” are. The question sounds simple, but every answer leaves someone out. Any group, including the political left and right, migrants, LGBTQ+ communities and or feminists, is made of individuals who rarely agree on everything. The labels that hold a group together also tend to harden into stereotypes. Those stereotypes then circulate within the group too, dividing people who share a cause.

ME/WE, presented as part of Alternative Roots, brings together artists whose lives involve migration, diaspora or intercultural exchange. Their work starts from specific histories and often carries a sense of loss. It also carries care for other people, and a persistent desire to keep making. Each artist shows how an individual finds a place within a collective, and how visible or invisible that place can be. Visitors are asked to see ME and WE as two halves of one relationship. A collective grows richer each time it makes room for another person’s difference.

Curated by Hsin-Yi Huang & Alice Luo.

Workshops & Talks

Underscore - 90-min immersive taster for BPOC/Global Majority dancers Annie Pui Ling Lok

As people of colour, there are many additional barriers and discomforts which we may feel in our interaction with certain dance forms and spaces, Contact Improvisation (CI) being one. This continues to be the subject of many conversations between Siobhan Davies Studios Artistic director Annie Pui Ling Lok and dance artist Nathaniel Parchment who co-facilitate the BPOC/GM Underscore regularly at Pembroke House as part of Siobhan Davies Studios programme. The Underscore is a structure developed in the 90’s by CI founder Nancy Stark Smith. The 20 phases of the Underscore invite dancers to collectively move through states of arriving into or exiting dancing and includes time to connect to yourself before connecting with others and to share reflections at the end. Annie will be taking the group through a shortened 90-min version of the framework (originally designed to be danced across 3-4hrs), exploring how CI can be owned and practiced by everyone; and be truly inclusive through a process of conscious decoloniality.

This 90-minute Underscore taster session is exclusively for dancers and movement practitioners who identify as BPOC/Global Majority who are interested in exploring Contact Improvisation (CI). To participate one should have some experience of or interest in CI and working with touch.

Limited capacity - sign-up at the reception, first come first serve. The workshop involves physical contact. Please dress in comfortable clothes to move in.

Presentation on Japanese Knotweed: Movement, Classification & Responsibility Takuya Watanabe

In this presentation, Takuya Watanabe shares his ongoing artistic research into Japanese knotweed, a plant brought from Japan to Europe in the nineteenth century as an ornamental commodity. Long after its commercial circulation ended, the plant has continued to spread through other forms of human activity. Once valued as a horticultural plant, it is now classified as an invasive species and treated as a risk to property and infrastructure.

The presentation follows three interconnected themes: Movement, Classification and Responsibility. Through these perspectives, Watanabe explores how the plant’s movement is intertwined with human activities, how its value and status have changed over time, and how responsibility might be assigned for consequences extending across generations.

Moving between these themes, he introduces individual projects, fieldwork experiences and encounters with people that have shaped his practice. He also presents his latest film project in development, Japanese Knotweed on Trial, which draws on existing legal doctrine to put the plant itself on trial and examine how law constructs responsibility.

notes on feeding each other Chán Magazine (Dot Zhihan Jia, Jiaying Kou)

Taking as its starting point the bilingual book ‘Our Daily Lives Have to Be a Satisfaction in Themselves: 40 Years of Bloodroot,’ by Selma Miriam and Noel Furie, edited by Emily Larned and published in a Chinese–English bilingual edition by 51 Personae in 2025, this workshop reflects on the legacy of Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant and community space in the United States, that closed in 2025 after 40 years of existence.

Through collective reading, recipe writing and working together, we will explore how communities are formed, sustained and cared for, and how we might create and maintain spaces for living and working together. Led by the editors, the workshop centres on recipe writing as a way of sharing knowledge and reflecting on the everyday practices through which we care for ourselves and one another. Participants are invited to bring their own experiences, memories and ideas into the process, treating recipes as both practical instructions and personal records of how we live.

Limited capacity - sign-up at the reception, first come first serve.

Writing archive in tongues (writing workshop) Yu'an Huang

Whilst Because Watching Pacifies (dir. Cetus Kuo Chin-Yun 郭敬耘, 2024) plays on a loop in the Reading Room, the workshop ‘Writing Archives in Tongues’ will take place in the afternoon, between screenings. Kuo’s film explores borders, displacement and the entangled histories of Taiwan and Southeast Asia. In the workshop, writer and curator Yu’an Huang leads participants to read excerpts from the film script and reflect on their own missing archives and forgotten taboos from where they were rooted before crossing the border to the UK. You are invited to write in any language or combination of languages that feel comfortable to you. This workshop offers a quiet corner in which to leave a trace of your own migration journeys.

Limited capacity - sign-up at the reception, first come first serve.

Film

In Petri Dish We Sing 《於培養皿內唱歌》(2025) dir. Yarli Allison | 28′30″ | EN subs

In the year 2135, embryonic stem cells can become anything we desire. Three lives intersect in a clinic where care and interconnectedness shape healing: a healer honouring ancestral practice with biotech, a grieving man growing furniture from his late lover’s cells, and a 79-year-old woman pursuing pregnancy through her own lab-grown gametes. But when cellular memories can also be rewritten, what futures could arise?

Content warning: discussion of miscarriage

Crescendo (2024) dir. Yasmin Anlan Huang | 14′04″ | EN subs

Crescendo begins with the director’s struggle during accent correction training while living in rural Maine as a Sinophone writer. Through repeated attempts to refine her speech and soften her accent in English, she comes to recognize that her mother tongue does not belong there, leaving her narrative suspended in a state of being lost in translation. She invites a close local friend, styled as an “American sweetheart,” to portray her. As rehearsals unfold, their collaboration gradually blurs the boundary between director and actor, probing whether translation—across language, identity, and emotion—is inherently political and violent, or whether it risks aestheticizing and romanticizing the very tragedies it seeks to articulate.

Bow and Rise 心獅同行 (2025) dir. Tsz Kei (Jasmine) Mok | 8′49″ | EN subs

Bow and rise 心獅同行 is a short student documentary that follows the Lion Dance troupe at Bristol University in the build up to Chinese New Year. Foreign students experience culture shock, while finding a new home within each other as well as developing their own self-identities. This film introduces themes of community, self-expression and liberation.

Because Watching Pacifies (2024) dir. Cetus Kuo 郭敬耘 | 85′ (looping) | EN subs

Two unacquainted twins, born into an Akha cultural taboo, drift across mirrored borderlands. Their lives paths unfolding on swings suspended between orders: the swidden life that once allowed free movement, and the borders that Cold War alliances drew around her, turning that movement into transgression. Through the protagonist’s voice, she reaches across the world toward a sister she has never met, tracing the outline of another life unfolding somewhere in the mountains of Taiwan.

Marketplace

Ashni Wilson · GlassSubterra · and more …