Feria FTA: a Weekend of Celebration

On May 29, 30, and 31, FTA celebrates its anniversary by inviting Montrealers to the Esplanade Tranquille at the Quartier des Spectacles for an epic weekend of free activities.

On Friday evening, ¡ A Festejar ! kicks off the festivities with a giant party; Rhythm & Hues and DJ DMOE from Medellín will keep the energy going with hot South American sounds. Saturday is a family day devoted to decolonial ecology, including a seed exchange and story hour. Sunday is a time to celebrate outside with Amour de jour. The weekend’s lineup includes dance workshops, an arts and crafts market, a silk-screening booth, and film screenings under the stars.

Bosque: a Magnificent Upside-down Forest

The artistic centerpiece of the anniversary weekend is Bosque. In this free show for all, a mysterious forest of legs reaching for the sky springs up in the Place des Festivals. After wowing audiences in cities across the Americas and Europe, with the help of thirty Montrealers, Brazil’s Clarice Lima stages a local version of this political and poetic urban occupation of public space. Bosque is also presented at Place d’Armes the following week.

The Weight of Words, the Weight of a Lifetime

To open the Festival, the legendary New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service will revive the famous 1965 debate between writer James Baldwin and conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge University, making it thrillingly relevant to the present. Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge is a galvanizing experience that challenges the myth of the American dream. A gem of contemporary Mexican theatre, Mi madre y el dinero features director Anacarsis Ramos alongside his mother Josefina Orlaineta, who has worked countless jobs during her life in order to survive. Combining documentary insight with imaginative power, it’s a subtle, warm-hearted work that speaks directly to the audience. It is also at the centre of FTA’s fundraising event on June 9, which showcases the sounds and tastes of Latin America.

Reimagined Dances

In Adentro!, Diana Szeinblum deconstructs Argentinian folk dances and uses new choreographic language to reshape her country’s national identity. In The Romeo, U.S. choreographer Trajal Harrell stages a speculative dance from the dawn of time and orchestrates a flamboyant parade bringing together a dozen captivating performers—and over 300 costumes! Dressed in cowboy boots, Stacey Désilier and Jossua Satinée embrace the rhythms of line dancing while destabilizing the mythology of the cowboy in Braids & Heritage. In from rock to rock… aka how magnolia was taken for granite, Jeremy Nedd, also from the U.S., focuses on the Milly Rock, a dance move started by rapper 2 Milly that was shamelessly ripped off by the video game Fortnite, becoming a viral sensation. A few days later, Nedd presents slidin’ thru, a free, informal piece performed on a basketball court. To a soundtrack of nostalgic hits, three performers sweep the audience along to the grand finale, when everyone is invited to bust a move.

Transmissions and Vibrations

A key figure in Montreal’s Hip Hop community, Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé assembles a family of extraordinary performers/creators in her new piece, 2par2—a vibrant epic about the nature of human relationships, featuring a hypnotic soundtrack by Shash’U. In Remember that time we met in the future?, Lara Kramer brings together four Indigenous artists with different practices and cultures. Through a choreography guided by dreams and ancestral travelling, she translates and transmits her unique creative approach.

Improbable Theatres

Each edition of FTA includes adventurous works that shake up the audience’s routine. This year, performer and choreographer Dana Michel occupies a pool in YOU CANNOT CAN to confront her fear of swimming. Evan Webber, a major figure in Toronto’s experimental theatre scene, gives the audience a personality test revolving around the character of Antigone in The Chains. At once literary and performative, this experience takes place in the community room at Cité-des-Hospitalières. And in Уя (Nest), the audience watches the action unfold from an apartment corridor. This fascinating piece by Kyrgyzstan’s Chagaldak Zamirbekov is the sole exception to the 2026 edition’s geographic focus on the Americas.

Lands in Crisis

A running theme of this year’s programme is the connections between different struggles, whether for the right to life or land rights. In Mystic-Métallic, choreographers Audrée Juteau, N. Zoey Gauld, and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus invent a “combustion dance” that finds a common frequency between bodies, machines, and land in response to the ravages of the mining industry in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Offbeat and poetic, Vampyr by Chile’s Manuela Infante deploys biting humour to denounce the excesses of the new green economy, whose intentions are not always good. Labour struggles, the destruction of the land, and Indigenous self-governance all figure prominently in Olivier Arteau’s adaptation of Querelle de Roberval by Kev Lambert. Hailed by critics and audiences alike since it was first performed at Théâtre du Trident in January, the play wraps up its ambitious Quebec tour at FTA.

Getting Intimate

A number of this year’s shows bring sensuality, eroticism, and sexuality to the fore, showing how these primal forces can be a means of connecting both to oneself and others. Hailing from São Paulo’s vibrant theatre scene, História do olho is a “noir porn fairytale” in which Brazil’s Janaina Leite and her cast adapt and update George Bataille’s scandalous Story of the Eye by gleefully indulging their own stories and libidos (for ages 18+). Quebec’s Emile Pineault presents Bottommost, a choreography of the underbelly that remaps the contours of intimacy, desire, and companionship. Philippe Cyr and Éric Noël offer a second chance to see Ces regards amoureux de garçons altérés, a show that earned two critics’ awards in 2025. Actor Gabriel Szabo wields Noël’s words like a scalpel, exposing the demons of drug and sex addiction with brutal honesty.

On the Threshold of the Real

Combining choreographic research and improvisation with light and sound, BOLT is an activation of positive energy and kinetic joy. Drawing on an Indigenous framework, choreographer Jeanette Kotowich reclaims artistic sovereignty and leads the audience into liminal spaces at the horizon of our imaginations. Meanwhile, inspired by an extraordinary hallucination she once experienced, Marie Brassard explores the limits of existence in The Ether. In her eighth work presented at FTA, the theatre artist and storyteller takes the bold experimentation she has been pursuing for over two decades to a new level.

Reclaiming the Body

Zapotec artist Lukas Avendaño celebrates his “muxeidad” in two shows that reflect his extraordinary artistic journey. Bardaje is an act of radical imagination that connects cultures and languages damaged by colonialism. This hypnotic performance piece will be performed in the chapel of Cité-des-Hospitalières. Meanwhile, Réquiem para un alcaraván invites the audience to take part in an extravagant ceremony celebrating muxe subjectivity. A rising star of the Brazilian scene, Jéssica Teixeira delivers a performance that’s part storytelling, part concert, and part cabaret in Monga. Adopting an immersive and celebratory approach, it tackles the contemporary discrimination, ableism, and fetishization surrounding so-called “atypical” bodies. In Autothérapie, Franco-Haitian choreographer Mackenzy Bergile embarks on an inner unbolting of the “statues” that shape his imagination in a powerful work of choreographic introspection where Yanvalou, Hip Hop, and contemporary dance collide.

FTA Playgrounds

Over 45 activities, most of them free, are offered alongside the shows. They include conversations with the artists, practical workshops, critical discussions, parties, and more. The highlights of this year’s activities at FTA Headquarters include an event with Guadeloupe-born author Olivier Marboeuf, who presents a group reading of his text La nuit juste avant le feu, evoking Caribbean revolutions of both the past and future. Bolivia’s María Galindo, who is known for her intuitive bastard feminism, will be in attendance for the Montreal premiere of her film Revolución puta, followed by a discussion.

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