30 October 2026 | Photo: Bernard Rubsamen
The anniversary year will also coincide with ‘Stage’, an immersive arena production built around footage from Bowie’s 1978 tour
A global programme of concerts, exhibitions, audiovisual experiences and special releases has been announced to mark what would have been David Bowie’s 80th birthday in 2027.
Titled Bowie80, the initiative launched this month and will continue throughout next year, bringing together projects across the US, UK and Europe. Bowie, who was born on 8 January 1947, died from cancer on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday. Further additions to the anniversary programme are expected to be announced over the coming months.
Among the newly announced projects is ‘BOWIE (breaking) GLASS’, an official symphonic production developed by Schirmer Theatrical and Copenhagen’s Østre Gasværk Teater. The show places Bowie’s original recordings in dialogue with the music of Philip Glass, combining live vocalists, musicians and orchestra with new arrangements by composer Paul Leonard-Morgan and projections drawn from the Bowie archives. Its world premiere is scheduled for May 2027 in Copenhagen, performed with Copenhagen Phil.
The visual arts programme will include ‘Strange Fascination’, a career-spanning photography exhibition opening at Morrison Hotel Gallery locations in New York and West Hollywood in early February. The exhibition will draw on material from the gallery and David Bowie Estate archives, including previously unreleased photographs documenting different periods of Bowie’s career.
Elsewhere, the V&A will take material from Bowie’s 90,000-item archive on tour across the UK, beginning in Dundee before travelling to Blackpool in 2027. The immersive production ‘David Bowie: You’re Not Alone’, which premiered at Lightroom in London, will also expand to Manchester, Brighton and Hamburg next year.
The programme extends into fashion and retail through a partnership with Nordstrom, with Bowie80 installations opening at the department store’s Seattle, New York and Chicago locations alongside limited-edition collections. Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is also preparing a dedicated Bowie80 retail pop-up and a series of birthday-weekend exhibitions, presentations and fan events.
The anniversary year will coincide with another large-scale Bowie project, ‘Stage’, which will bring newly restored footage from his 1978 Isolar II ‘Heroes’ world tour to arenas as an immersive audiovisual production. Filmmaker Brett Morgen discovered the footage while researching his 2022 documentary ‘Moonage Daydream’. The production combines large-format projections and transparent LED screens with new lighting and immersive sound, and will premiere at Berlin’s Uber Arena on 14 February 2027 as part of the 77th Berlin International Film Festival.
