Why you won’t want to miss Festival TransAmériques
Multilingual, festive and a yearly homage to innovation, the Festival TransAmériques — or FTA, for short — reflects the rhythm of Montréal. The 18th edition will take over the city from May 22 to June 5, 2024, to celebrate new works in contemporary dance, theatre and the performing arts. FTA also encourages an open dialogue between artists and audience through workshops, debates and round table discussions that echo and expand on the performances.
What’s in store for 2024
The 18th edition of the Festival TransAmériques will present 20 works by artists from around the world in various venues throughout downtown Montréal. As described by the co-artistic directors Martine Dennewald and Jessie Mill, the themes this year range from maternal love to natural splendour to indigenous power and the strength of the collective. The invited creators will express the state of their lives in movement, words and form.
An opening night to remember
Among the strongest voice in Lebanon’s contemporary performing arts, choreographer Ali Chahrour will open this year’s festival with a work titled Told By My Mother. It draws on song, music and dance to exorcise sorrow and extoll the power of maternal love in two stories lived through by his family.
Stark gestures lead to moments of stillness when the silence of frozen time vibrates with the intensity of the performers’ gazes. Chahrour and his remarkable team of musicians and performers have created a work of memory rooted in reality that soothes sorrow and nourishes hope.
Must-sees in dance
Uruguay’s Tamara Cubas draws on choreographic composition as well as collective organization in Multitud. Inherently political, the piece (presented here in a North American premiere) unites 75 performers to show how agency, difference and dissent are fundamental elements of any shared undertaking.
With playful wit and style, Amrita Hepi explores dance as a source of memory and resistance in Rinse, interweaving movements and words, stories, rhythms and dance techniques.
In ODE, a pop-pagan procession orchestrated by the masterful hands of choreographer Catherine Gaudet, 10 radiant performers take aim at false pretenses in a deceptively simple landscape.
Montreal choreographer Clara Furey and her collaborators reclaim eroticism on their own terms in UNARMOURED, turning the body into a site of cosmic allegiance, sensual and liberated.
Somewhere between choreography and installation, Weathering is a multi-sensory performance welded together by 10 unique performers. This stunning, radiant work by Faye Driscoll is a unique expression of both the disasters and the transformations haunting our times.
Yup’ik artist Emily Johnson creates performance gatherings that centre around reworlding practices, Indigenous knowledge and the sovereignty of communities. Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards invites audiences to become part of creating a radically-just and Indigenized future.
Not to be missed in theatre
A leading figure among European theatre’s new voices, Rébecca Chaillon celebrates Black women in Carte noire nommée désir, a visceral ceremony of reappropriation embracing both pop culture and spirituality.
Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim invite us to an exhilarating day of gaming with asses.masses. In this interactive experience, audience members play out the epic journey of a herd of revolutionary donkeys.
A radical interdisciplinary journey, The Cloud is a politically engaged, joy-seeking performance signed Atom Cianfarani and Alexis O’Hara set against the backdrop of environmental catastrophe. You’ll never look at data or animals the same way again!
Is killing a fascist a crime or a legitimate act of resistance? Worldviews collide in renowned Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’ bracing political theatre with Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.
In the heart of a forest of sound, artists Émilie Monnet and Waira Nina deliver Nigamon/Tunai, a poetic manifesto forged by friendship that advocates protecting water, land, stars and ancestral knowledge.
And some amazing undefinable performances
Kamissa Ma Koïta and Elena Stoodley lead the latest creation from PME-ART: Survival Technologies. Concerned by artificial intelligence, they turn to dance — the ultimate tool of resistance and emancipation with a radically joyful approach.
An exquisitely tender ode to eroticism and an appeal to reconnect with the sacred aspect of nature, Floreus by Sébastien Provencher is a delightfully contemplative and unsettling work that awakens the senses and opens up the heart.
Channeling dreams, stories and songs, Gorgeous Tongue, created by Anishinaabe choreographer Lara Kramer and performed by Jeanette Kotowich, embodies and celebrates Indigenous futurity.
In I am from Reykjavik, by Sonia Hughes, a simple invitation to meet becomes an opportunity to rethink the world — to gain a new perspective on the city from within a small house for great souls.
Bon festival!
Isa Tousignant
Isa Tousignant is a Montréal-based editor and storyteller with a curiosity that runs deeper than most. She has chatted life philosophies with celebrity chefs, gemologists, arena rockers and furries. (All were transformative.) Her free time is spent designing jewellery and laughing at her husband’s jokes.