At a time when opportunities for cultural exchange are shrinking, Powerhouse: International offers a charged meeting ground for theater, music, dance, installation, and works that defy category. The former power plant becomes a place where artists and audiences move through each other’s rhythms, stories, and forms. Across nearly three months, the program ranges from global superstars to daring new voices, each testing the stage’s capacity to provoke, connect, and transform.

That energy is matched by a commitment to access: more than 10,000 tickets at $30 to ensure that the work is for everyone. This festival is rooted in artistic freedom, experimentation, and bold response in a moment that demands nothing less—unstuffy, unbound, porous, alive.

The inaugural festival in 2025 was the building’s first series of performing arts events, and featured acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who presented his multidisciplinary opera-theater work “Sibyl”; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece “Larsen C” is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who performed her “Cadela Força Trilogy,” a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.

Music offerings included concerts by Claire Rousay; Moor Mother and Pussy Riot; Yamantaka Eye and aya; and Red Hot’s Transa, and a closing performance and party led by Amari Marshall, the choreographer who serves as dance captain for Beyoncé.