March 15, 2011 – Seminal oeuvres, hybrid experiences, shows that shock, decompartmentalized dance and mutant theatre. The Festival TransAmériques is going to places inhabited by originality only, places where the unexpected is pursued, from near and far. Out of today’s crop of ideas, it’s fashioning a rich cultural mosaic that exposes contemporary creation in all its vitality.
This year’s edition, to take place from May 26 to June 11, is shaping up to be as grand and hard hitting as ever, especially since some of the biggest names in dance and theatre are again coming to Montréal for it. Those who attended the FTA in 2007 will no doubt have indelible memories of Israel Galvàn, for example. This year the master of flamenco body language will perform El final de este estado de cosas, redux, a variation on the Apocalypse punctuated by flamenco, heavy metal and contemporary music.
Also in dance, FTA 2011 will present Crystal Pyte’s The You Show, a work in which the British Columbia choreographer transforms – with humour, sensitivity and theatricality – an ordinary conjugal incident into an earth-shattering confrontation. For the first time in 10 years, the Festival will also bring back Belgian company Les Ballets C de B with its new Gardenia, a show that tells the sad story of a cabaret through the lives of men with no apparent history and a faded transsexual, to the music of Aznavour, Dalida and Ravel.
Speaking of theatre, multidisciplinary artist Marie Brassard will deliver her company Infrarouge’s sixth creation, Moi qui me parle à moi-même dans le futur (I who talk to myself in the future), a dreamlike autofiction about the beginning of the world based on adolescent memories. Several other local and international works will complete the program for this fifth edition of the FTA, which as always also includes a wide range of workshops, roundtables, festivities and meetings between artists and the general public. Eclectic and transcendent.
