OZ Arts Nashville Launches International 7-Show Winter/Spring Line-up, Featuring Artists from Spain, Japan, South Africa, and more

Nashville, Tenn. – Fresh on the heels of a buzzworthy fall featuring U.S. Premieres by international and local artists, contemporary arts center OZ Arts Nashville continues its thrilling season of presentations by artists from around the world with 7 highly visual performance engagements by artists from Spain, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States. The technology-forward line-up includes the return of popular artists like Tokyo-based multimedia wizard and choreographer Hiroaki Umeda and Chicago’s beloved analog-influenced theater company Manual Cinema, but also kicks off by introducing audiences to two fresh faces: Barcelona’s Agrupación Señor Serrano brings their clever and thought-provoking live performed film Birdie on January 30 & 31, while rising dance star Ogemdi Ude and her team of 6 fierce dancers present her astonishing new workMAJOR, which marries majorette dance and contemporary forms, from February 12-14, just one month after a sold-out New York premiere.

Barcelona’s legendary visual theater and multimedia collective Agrupación Señor Serrano kicks off OZ’s Winter/Spring line-up January 30 & 31with their “thrilling and thought-provoking” production, Birdie. With large-scale projections magnifying the video shot live on stage, the intellectually vibrant work merges Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary film The Birds, the game of golf, and 2,000 tiny toy animals to dive into the nature of both animal and human migration. Birdie is guaranteed to stimulate timely conversations, and comes to Nashville as the final stop on a U.S. tour that includes engagements at New York’s prestigious Lincoln Center and the West Coast’s Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA.

One of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” rising dance star Ogemdi Ude brings her tender and fierce homage to Black femininity, MAJOR, to OZ Arts from February 12-14. The Georgia native created this bold new work inspired by majorette culture, set to the groove of the Southern-born dance form while merging it with contemporary styles. The production also invites a local drumline and majorette squad to join in for joyful finale that will not soon be forgotten. MAJOR arrives in Nashville after a world premiere last summer at the Kampnagel International Festival in Germany and a sold-out U.S. premiere at New York Live Arts in January.

In late March, virtuosic, Tokyo-based multimedia designer and choreographer Hiroaki Umeda returns to OZ Arts for the first time since his sensational Southeastern debut in 2019. His high-velocity performance style merges multiple video projections with inventive sound design and dance to create an unexpected thrill ride. Audiences are invited to experience a new solo performance by Umeda in his signature style, in addition to a more introspective group work set on 5 femme Hip-hop dancers from Japanese collective Somatic Field Project.

Also making her return visit to Nashville is post-modern, Australian cabaret legend Meow Meow, who will bewitch audiences at OZ Arts for one-night-only on April 11. The deliciously deranged diva and disruptor “drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century” (Time Out New York) with her hilarious and highly intoxicating stage presence, performing a blend of bawdy tunes, scintillating covers, and political songs from the Weimar Republic.

The final international project in OZ’s 2025/26 Season is a cross-continental collaboration between South Africa’s Impilo Mapantsula and Switzerland-based choreographer Jeremy Nedd which explores the high-octane speed of the Pantsula dance form juxtaposed with the transcendent moments of Pentecostal “praise breaks.” The Ecstatic features fast-paced footwork and trance-like moments of calm, making its U.S. Premiere at OZ Arts on May 1 & 2.

Local artists will take center stage again at the fifth annual Brave New Works Lab, featuring multiple short-form creations by artists in Middle Tennessee with performances May 14-16. The game-changing laboratory for adventurous local artists has already served as a crucial incubator for some of the most exciting new work happening in the region, showcasing 16 new projects across the first four years.  A selection of new works for the 2026 Lab will be announced later in the spring, chosen from dozens of applications submitted last fall.

The 2025/26 Season closes with the latest magical production from beloved Chicago-based company Manual Cinema. In The 4th Witch, stunning projection techniques and live music combine to tell the story of a young girl living through war who is adopted by the three witches from Macbeth. Remembered from their amazing multimedia re-invention of Frankenstein at OZ Arts in 2019, Manual Cinema returns to Nashville from June 4-6 with this highly-anticipated new production that features the company’s deeply resonant visualstorytelling and ingenious mix of old and new technologies.

“Artists continue to lead the way in helping us reimagine the most pressing issues of our time, allowing us to see new visions of the future – and we are thrilled to feature this line-up of culturally impactful creators at OZ Arts in 2026,” said Mark Murphy, OZ Arts Executive and Artistic Director. “These tumultuous times remind us of the power of our shared humanity, and we invite Nashville to come to OZ to engage in the global dialogue sparked by these brilliant, innovative artists.”

Full details for the Winter/Spring 2026 Line-up can be found here. OZ Arts will continue to offer accessible pricing for this season of international programming, with General Admission and Generous Admission prices for the general public, as well an Artist & Creative Community discounted rate to ensure all local artists, educators, students, and arts administrators can attend the presentations without financial barriers. Pick-Three-Get-One-Free packages are also available for just $95, including a general admission ticket to any trio of Winter/Spring programs of your choosing, plus a complimentary ticket to the Brave New Works Lab in May.

The 2025/26 Season at OZ Arts Nashville is made possible, in part, by funding from the Tennessee Arts Commission, HCA Healthcare / Tri-Star Health, The Sandra Schatten Foundation, Advanced Financial Foundation, and Amazon. For more information or to purchase tickets for upcoming performances, visit ozartsnashville.org.

OZ Arts 2026 Winter/Spring Lineup
Selected images from the Winter/Spring Line-up Here

Agrupación Señor Serrano (Spain): Birdie | January 30 & 31, 2026
“An impeccable story of humankind told in the three dimensions of a scale model." — Le Pais
“A wild and wonderful ride…thrilling and thought-provoking.” — The QR U.K.

Bold, imaginative, and unforgettable, Birdie is a genre-defying theatrical experience that straddles the line between visual art, film, and live performance. Drawing from sources as varied as Hitchcock’s The Birds, the game of golf, animal migration, and human survival, Birdie delivers a revelatory multimedia production featuring live video, film fragments, scale models, 2,000 miniature animals, and three magnetic performers. With incisive wit and unfailing humanity, the show takes audiences on a migration between two worlds — one fractured by war, displacement, and environmental collapse, and the other defined by order, progress, and social welfare. What connects the two is an unstoppable journey of migrants, and the ceaseless movement of all that exists.

Ogemdi Ude: MAJOR | February 12-14, 2026
“A polyphonic, tenderly fierce homage to Black femininity.” – Kampnagel, Hamburg
“25 to Watch…There is joy to be found in Ude’s work.” – Dance Magazine

Celebrating the power and legacy of majorette dance, a team of Southern Black femmes embodies the movement of their girlhood to answer the questions of their present. MAJOR preserves, transforms, and continues majorette tradition through electrifying movement, documentary theater, a live marching band, and an online interview archive. Exploring themes of physical memory, sexuality, and sensuality, this compelling new work honors and uplifts the creative practices and stories of the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Harlem, New York and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. As an artist and educator, she supports others in investigating their cultural, familial, and personal histories — how they are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement.

Hiroaki Umeda (Japan): assimilating and Movement Slate 1 | March 26-28, 2026
“Like a tin man with oil flowing freely through his veins…”— The New York Times
“Choreography on the edge between dance, science and audio-visual installation…. Umeda resonates with the agitation of the world, in a form of physico-chemical trance.” — Paris Art

Renowned for his “virtuoso melding of technology and movement” (Scotland Herald), choreographer and performer Hiroaki Umeda redefines the boundaries of dance andperformance with his inventive use of multiple video projections and immersive sound art. A true interdisciplinary force — choreographer, dancer, and designer of audio, image, and lighting — Umeda creates high-velocity, visually stunning experiences that blur the line between installation and live performance. Following riveting performances in 2019, his thrilling fusion of body, light, and sound returns to OZ Arts with two internationally acclaimed multimedia works: His stunning solo assimilating is a high-octane visual spectacle, and his cinematic group work Moving State 1 highlights five female Hip-hop performers from his influential Somatic Field Project.

Meow Meow (Australia): Diva & Disruptor | April 11, 2026
“The deliciously deranged postmodern diva Meow Meow, who has bewitched and bewildered audiences the world over, drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century.” – Time Out NY

Hilarious and highly intoxicating, Meow Meow returns to her adoring fans in Nashville with her unique brand of subversive and sublime cabaret art, which has thrilled, inspired, and occasionally terrified audiences globally from London’s West End to Lincoln Center, Berlin to Shanghai, and the Hollywood Bowl to the Sydney Opera House. Named one of the “Top Performers of the Year” by The New Yorker, the crowd-surfing tragi-comedienne’s solo works have been commissioned by David Bowie, Pina Bausch, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others.

It is hard to describe her uniquely addictive sense of humor and triple-threat stage talent, but Time Out New York came close when they wrote: “Meow Meow's parody of glitz is part of a package that also includes physical comedy, social commentary and a brilliantly eclectic polyglot repertoire, with a special affinity for the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.” As Meow herself says: “I always will sing a political song while doing the splits…I still want people to laugh while I'm getting the message across.”

Impilo Mapantsula (South Africa) and Jeremy Nedd (Switzerland): The Ecstatic | May 1 & 2, 2026
“Lightning-fast feet, dazzling tempo, passionate energy, relevance, combined with virtuosity. It will make its way around the world.” — Neue Zurcher Zeitung (New Zurich News)

The furiously fast footwork of Pantsula, a South African percussive street dance style, is juxtaposed with soaring Pentecostal “praise breaks” when the six members of Johannesburg-based Impilo Mapantsula make their U.S. Debut in The Ecstatic. This internationally-acclaimed collaboration with Basel-based choreographer Jeremy Nedd is a high-octane celebration of the youth-driven culture of Pantsula, which is rooted in high-speed virtuosicfootwork but has also given rise to its own lifestyle, language, music, and fashion. In the final days of Apartheid, the movement gave a voice to a whole generation.

The praise break in Pentecostal services is a pause — a break in the church service, where the dancing body, voice, and music energetically coalesce and start to blur the difference between ecstatic and cathartic. As the artists ask themselves what happens when these two worlds converge – what happens in this transcendental moment of “break” – they discover and “break open” a new space all their own.

Brave New Works Lab 2024 | May 16-18, 2024
“One of the most interesting and dynamic presentations of locally grown talent.” — Nashville Scene
“A crucial incubator for stage artists & collectives experimenting between performing arts disciplines… this platform enables the brewing of boundary pushing works in progress.” – Music City Review

Celebrate local innovation and creativity with a bold evening of entirely original short-form performances featuring dance, theater, music, and multimedia. Now in its fifth year, the Brave New Works Lab has become one of the most important resources for daring Nashville-based artists working in contemporary performance, inviting them to transform OZ Arts into a laboratory for the creation and premiere of new works and works-in-progress. Encouraging multimedia experimentation and collaboration across disciplines, the lab creates a safe space for high-risk artistic adventures and has already served as a crucial incubator for some of the most exciting new work happening in Middle Tennessee. 

Projects for the Brave New Works Lab are under review from the previously announced open call for artist proposals. The program will be announced later this Spring.

Manual Cinema: The 4th Witch | June 4-6, 2026
“Pure Magic… a theater experience unlike anything else. Fly, don’t walk, to see this show.” –City Paper
“Enthralling…Balancing mystery and memory, The 4th Witch makes a stunning case for imagination as a tool of resistance and escape.” – Post and Courier

Told through breathtaking shadow puppetry, actors in silhouette, and evocative live music, Manual Cinema’s latest theatrical experience is a “visually sumptuous” (City Paper) inversion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Orphaned by war, a young girl is rescued by three witches, who agree to take her on as an apprentice on the condition that she must never use her powers for revenge. Consumed by grief and rage, the girl comes to realize that it was the warlord Macbeth who killed her parents — and that she must choose between reconciliation or vengeance.

Perfect for families and theater buffs alike, this highly-anticipated new production showcases Manual Cinema’s deeply resonant visual storytelling and ingenious mix of old and new technologies. You won’t want to miss the acclaimed company’s first return to OZ Arts since their sold-out hit Frankenstein.

Recommended for middle school and up. This production explores themes of grief, war, and generational conflict. It includes loud sounds and flashing lights.

ABOUT OZ ARTS NASHVILLE

Founded in 2013 by the Ozgener family, OZ Arts Nashville has quickly established itself as one of the Southeast's most influential and respected producers and presenters focused on the creation and presentation of significant performing and visual artworks by diverse cultural visionaries who are making vital contributions to the evolution of contemporary culture. Through performances, exhibitions, and community events, OZ Arts focuses on producing and presenting the work of local and visiting artists who reflect our diverse society, utilize new artistic forms and technology in creative ways, and provide opportunities for meaningful engagement with audiences, students and cultural and civic leaders. OZ Arts' unique creative warehouse has developed a reputation as a major national and regional laboratory for experimentation and a home for contemporary dance and performance. More than 70,000 audience members have been introduced to adventurous artists from around the world since the organization opened, and hundreds of local and regional artists have used OZ’s 10,000 square-foot warehouse theater to develop new works. For more information, please visit ozartsnashville.org.

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