Feeding impatient dreams
Montreal, Tuesday, January 30, 2024 – Martine Dennewald and Jessie Mill, co-artistic directors of Festival TransAmériques, are delighted to reveal five major dance and theatre performances from among the twenty shows of the Festival’s 18th edition, which will take place in Montreal from May 22 to June 5, 2024. Tickets for these shows, with the exception of one free outdoor production, are on sale as of today. The entire 2024 line-up will be launched on March 19.
Ambitious and far-reaching, FTA’s programme once again stretches the imagination and delves deep into the complexity of the world around us. This year in particular, the Festival’s artists offer us a tenacious glimmer of light and life. What kind of rituals can we invent to rediscover a sense of the sacred, of celebration, of sharing? The power of stories, the resilience of the families we invent for ourselves, and art as a technique for survival are all among the upcoming Festival’s key themes.
The Chaillon frenzy
FTA is proud to present the North American premiere of Carte noire nommée désir by the flamboyant Black theatre-maker Rébecca Chaillon. A leading figure among the new voices in European theatre, the Martinique-born director, author and performer has created a socio-political theatrical satire that thrilled audiences at Festival d’Avignon last summer. Together with seven other Black female performers from different artistic backgrounds – poetry, dance, circus, singing – she examines the stereotypes associated with Black femininity. Uncommonly eloquent, through stunning images and a sense of humour rooted in punk, the company reveals how Black bodies are hypersexualized, exoticized, and alienated by white supremacy and colonialism. Queer and afrofeminist in nature, Chaillon’s courageously political theatre is also a lavish aesthetic journey.
Perrault in subtle detail
Jérémie Niel is back at FTA with Au cœur de la rose (Généalogie d’une tristesse), a play by the legendary Quebec filmmaker and poet Pierre Perrault. On an island in the Gulf, where the Father, Mother and Daughter live, the river spits out a schooner from which a captain and a sailor disembark. All of a sudden, the Daughter sees a wild possibility of escaping her fate. In Niel’s production, striking video and soundscapes are inhabited by six remarkable actors including Sébastien Ricard, Nahéma Ricci and Evelyne de la Chenelière, who embody a fable steeped in myth about the desire to be elsewhere and a burning need for freedom. In the misty atmosphere of Jérémie Niel’s staging, audiences will experience a delicate and peculiar Quebec classic.
A rock show… about personal growth
Catherine Gaudet, winner of the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal in 2022, is without doubt among the major choreographers of our times, with a reputation reaching well beyond Quebec and Canada. After the dazzling international success of Les jolies choses, she returns to with ODE, a large-scale piece featuring an exceptional cast of ten dancers, her largest ensemble to date. Both a pop-pagan procession and a ritual of collective growth, this new work brings back the refined and complex figures of fractal logic Gaudet is known for, with a dash of a capella singing to evoke states of ecstasy and fascination.
Theatre that represents the unthinkable
Do we sometimes need to violate the rules of democracy in order to better defend it? In Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues, in charge of Festival d’Avignon since last year, stages a disturbing political fable in which eight incredible actors play a family that kills fascists as an act of resistance to dictatorship. Rodrigues’ formidable story is proof of how far theatre can go, how poetry and the power of words can stir up the most glaring of moral dilemmas.
Apply now for a poetic uprising!
In addition to the four shows going on sale today, FTA invites all Montrealers to participate in a unique artistic adventure. Monumental and spellbinding, Multitud by Uruguayan artist Tamara Cubas is this Festival’s large free outdoor show, presented for three nights in the Place des Festivals (Quartier des spectacles). Every evening at dusk, this vigorous choreographic work will set 75 local amateur dancers of all ages and backgrounds in motion. Travelling from chaos to the euphoria of solidarity, they create a series of tableaux evoking the power of the collective. The immense poetic force contained in this micro-portrait of humanity is sure to be one of this year’s Festival’s highlights!
Applications are open as of today. Please register here.
