The popular BLEACH Festival relaunches for 2026 with a program that puts contemporary art, performance and community at the heart of HOTA and encourages the audience to see their city in a new light.
After 15 years of evolution, BLEACH is entering a new phase. What began as a small, beach-based fringe festival has grown into a much larger multi-arts event. This year it changes shape again, moving from winter into spring and taking over the HOTA precinct for 11 days and nights in October.
For Artistic Director Felix Preval the change of dates is more than a calendar adjustment; it’s about building creative confidence, facilitating unexpected encounters, and making HOTA feel new again in all the best ways.
‘This year the Festival goes through another evolution, capturing the warmth and renewal of springtime, and a full program that takes over the HOTA precinct’ says Preval.
The program includes almost 50 free and ticketed events, running from midday to midnight, and bringing together more than 290 artists from the Gold Coast, around Australia, and overseas. For Preval the magic happens when the artists and audiences rediscover the city and encounter art and performance in places they might not expect.
‘BLEACH Festival is a really key moment for local creatives. It’s exciting to see the Gold Coast arts sector grow and mature, and for this to be reflected in the program.’
That local confidence is central to his vision. Rather than seeing HOTA simply as a collection of venues, Â BLEACH will expand across its indoor and outdoor spaces, including the lake precinct that will be reimagined as a stage for live music, with artists including Tijuana Cartel, Karl S Williams and Ella Fence.
‘In order to really plant the festival at HOTA we’re reimagining spaces indoors and out, across the precinct, so that audiences encounter contemporary art and performance in new and surprising ways, and feel invited to stay and discover more across the day,’ he says.
There are many new and exciting works on the program across dance, theatre, music, and circus. New Zealand artist Oli Matheson brings Berlin to HOTA with The Butterfly Who Flew Into the Rave and there’s a riotous work, Cuddle, by Harrison Ritchie-Jones that combines contemporary dance with martial arts, boot scooting, and wildly inventive technology.
Works by First Nations artists feature strongly in the Festival including Karul’s Kuramanunya (Gore-rah-mah-nunya) a solo dance theatre performance that pays tribute to ancestral strength, spirit and enduring legacy; free events by First Nations contemporary circus company Na Djinang around the Lake Precinct; and Arc Circus working in collaboration with the Yugambeh Dancers. There’s more fun for families with the acclaimed acrobatic work A Simple Space, by Gravity and Other Myths, in its Queensland debut.
Two major projects by local company Everybody NOW! really embody Preval’s vision for the Festival. BEACON, created with British design artist Morag Myerscough, will rise four storeys at the heart of the Festival and be illuminated at night, ‘transforming into a giant neon tower of joy!’ Sunset each day will be given voice by a community choir of two hundred people.
The Festival will end with a bang with High Tide on Sunday 11 October. This spectacular closing ceremony features a daring aerial ballet performed on (and over…) the lake with professional jet-ski and jet-pack performers, a psychedelic rock band, and even a procession of giant jellyfish puppets, created by Dead Puppet Society and operated by a hundred community puppeteers. Later in the evening, High Tide will evolve into a family-friendly rave to farewell BLEACH 2026 in style.
Underpinning all this excitement and high-level creativity is a simple ambition about people, place, and the power of art. ‘I hope BLEACH will make people proud to be Gold Coasters and see their city in a new light,’ says Preval.
Come early, stay late, and see what happens in between!
