A multicoloured winged unicorn adorns the promotional materials of this year’s Festival TransAmériques (FTA). Soon after I arrived in Montreal for a two-night stint at the galvanizing annual showcase of international theatre and dance, I encountered the pixelated equine on a poster that instructed audiences to attend FTA by metro, bicycle, or gallop. At the time, I chuckled. But around 24 hours later, damp from a gleeful, rainy dash between consecutive shows, I realized that yes, actually: j’ai galopé.
Less obviously whimsical were the three theatrical offerings I experienced. From a Nicaraguan woman in exile to labourers following a British princess’ unwieldy commands, many of the plays’ key figures grappled with the violent whims of unseen governmental figures. To represent these charged dynamics, the shows drew heavily on reality; even the sole fictional production imagined itself as a documentary. While I only saw a small portion of co-artistic directors Martine Dennewald and Jessie Mill’s deftly constructed, 20-show lineup (presented with both English and French surtitles, as needed), I observed in this year’s programming a definite commitment to platforming artists interested in questioning theatre’s relationship to the real world.
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Contextualized by an FTA press release as the “centrepiece of this year’s festival,” writer-director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Lacrima exhibits an artisanal degree of complexity. An ensemble of 10 actors fluidly slips between different characters as dazzling split-screen live video design traces a narrative that’s global in scope. (The show is produced by the National Theatre of Strasbourg, where Nguyen is director; the FTA features in a head-spinning list of co-producers.)
This virtuosity echoes Lacrima’s plot, which is itself about world-class craftsmanship. Paris fashion house Maison Beliana has eight months and 22 days to design and deliver a fictional English princess’ opulent wedding dress. To complete the project, it collaborates with a Mumbai embroidery company and a collective of women lacemakers from the town of Alençon in Normandy; both employ painstakingly slow techniques that go back centuries. All must adhere to strict ethical guidelines, and agree to keep the dressmaking process secret for 100 years.
Amid this pressurized environment, the workers’ personal lives intrude, sometimes in highly urgent configurations. Domestic violence, buried memories, and life-threatening illnesses loom. And a spectre of tragedy hangs in the air: During the play’s electric opening minutes, Beliana’s première d’atelier, Marion (Maud Le Grevellec), overdoses in front of the completed dress before Lacrima flashes back to the start of the process.
On a certain level, the show is intensely realistic. Benjamin Moreau’s exquisite costume design basks in detail, to the point that it took me a while to notice much of the double- and triple-casting. The script rotates between French, English, Tamil, and French sign language, depending on who’s speaking to whom, with fictional translators mediating when needed. And the cameras frequently zoom in on hands embroidering, sewing, and lacemaking.
At the same time, Nguyen’s staging is deeply theatrical. Frequently, the Paris, Alençon, and Mumbai workspaces occupy the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe’s stage at once. At first, they each get their own area; littered with busts and scraps of cloth, Maison Beliana’s studio — the largest — is bordered by walls of flowing, bridal-white fabric. Eventually, though, Nguyen complicates this delineation, with overworked embroiderer Abdul (Charles Vinoth Irudhayaraj) starting to work on a table in what was initially the Paris studio. These collapsed boundaries clarify the larger power dynamic at play: the labourers, each exploited to different degrees, become visually interchangeable, while the princess herself — with her outlandish, occasionally hubristic demands — remains a disembodied voice.
Lacrima warps time. Although its characters complete repetitive actions for hours on end, the production moves like a thriller. Pulpy, cinematic music thrums almost constantly (it’s credited to Jean-Baptiste Cognet, Teddy Gauliat-Pitois, and Antoine Richard). Running two hours and 55 minutes with no intermission (save for a three-minute pause), the show is a marathon, but an exhilarating one.
While Nguyen based Lacrima’s depiction of the dress’ global supply chain on intensive research, the play’s characters are entirely fictional, as emphasized in the text of an opening projection (designed by Jérémie Scheidler). Still, within the world of the play, the narrative receives a documentary framing. Through voice-over, the princess narrates the ups and downs of the construction process, and the production finishes with epilogue-like text divulging the characters’ fates. Part of the show’s aura of mystery is who will watch this documentary, since the story is confidential: is the English government creating this for the benefit of audiences 100 years from now?
Centroamérica, an actual piece of documentary theatre, also spans across multiple countries. “In Mexico, we know nothing about Central America,” co-creator and -performer Lázaro G. Rodríguez informs the audience early on. In the 90 minutes that follow, he and Luisa Pardo, founders of the accomplished Mexican collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, narrate their attempts to create a show about the seven-nation region.
Split by projected text into two parts, the piece at first resembles a travelogue. As Pardo and Rodríguez discuss roaming through Central America in search of inspiration, footage of their trek appears above. Different locales inspire diverging artistic ideas. They consider making a show about the Guatemalan genocide, climate change activists in Honduras, the liminality of the Panama Canal, or Belize in general. But it’s late 2023 (or perhaps early 2024), and Pardo cannot stop thinking about Israel’s continued violence in Gaza. Rodríguez reads out an affecting excerpt from her diary in which she doubts art’s ability to transform reality.
Set designer Sergio López Vigueras juxtaposes these existential concerns with a tropical aesthetic. Upstage, in front of a large fabric painting depicting a jungle-bordered lake, potted plants surround a small circular pool filled with real water. When the play begins, two solid-colour rectangles of synthetic material occupy different areas of the Théâtre Rouge du Conservatoire stage; as it progresses, Pardo and Rodríguez place down more rectangles, some with garish patterns. The sheets resemble beach towels in shape, and the performers sometimes lie on them accordingly — but once dozens fill the stage, they start overlapping as towels never would, making the whole image evocatively off-kilter.
It’s no doubt essential for theatre creators to grapple with whether art can actually affect change — in Toronto, companies have lately appeared unwilling to raise similar concerns, perhaps because they’re busy defending their existence, a process that arguably demands confidence in the work’s utility. That said, in the first half of Centroamérica, the self-doubt becomes so intense that the artists seem nearly defeated, and the show a little limp. I began to long for Pardo and Rodríguez to take a shot at transforming reality, futile though the attempt may be.
Centroamérica’s second part fulfills that wish. Interspersed throughout the show are snippets of an interview with a Nicaraguan woman that was exiled a couple years previous by that country’s dictatorial government. Fearing retribution, she hides her face from the camera and employs the pseudonym Maria. While tertiary to the travelogue section of the show, we eventually discover that she’s asked Pardo to enter Nicaragua and move her brother from a pandemic-era mass grave into one that also holds their mother. Pardo grabs at this chance to genuinely help someone. As the show recounts her escapade, it gathers momentum, climaxing with a tense, projection-less interview between Pardo and a civil service agent (played by Rodríguez) regarding an exhumation certificate.
Reflecting on the duo’s experience with Maria, Rodríguez declares that their art has finally transformed reality. It’s a warming sentiment, but overly neat; while Pardo’s actions enacted real-life change, did documenting them in the finished production really increase their impact? I’m not sure — but I’m glad Centroamérica leads us toward such questions in the first place.
Similar insecurities about art’s place in the world surface in playwright-performer Dorcy Rugamba’s Hewa Rwanda, lettre aux absents, presented at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines in a staged reading. Rugamba opens the show by sharing that soldiers murdered most of his family in 1994, at the start of the genocide in Rwanda.
He wonders how words can express such pain, and seems to conclude they cannot. Still, Hewa Rwanda does what it can. In front of a projected family photo, Rugamba recounts memories of the victims, including his father Cyprien, himself a poet and theatre artist. In an interview published by FTA, Dorcy describes the show as “a form of communion with the departed,” and the image-rich text embodies this goal by grabbing onto personal details — smiles and scoffs, habits and passions — and holding them close.
The remarkable Senegalese musician Mujnan accompanies Rugamba, pairing complex electric-guitar fingerpicking with impassioned belting. When the narrative reaches its zenith, Rugamba steps aside and looks toward the family photo as Mujnan uses a loop pedal to generate crescendoing waves of sound. On the night I attended, much of the audience proceeded to sob fiercely.
In today’s theatrical ecosystem, a staged reading tends to imply an unfinished product. But in the case of Hewa Rwanda, the approach makes sense: Rugamba’s encounter isn’t just with the audience, but with the script in front of him — the current fruits of his battle to find language that nears the truth.
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Next to these clear-eyed looks at reality, FTA’s dance programming offered welcome abstraction — while I’m not an experienced critic of the medium, I wholly appreciated the two productions I took in.
Shiraz, from the Iranian, Europe-based choreographer Armin Hokmi, is a precise exercise in theme and variation. On a stark white stage, a six-person ensemble takes small steps back and forth, hips lightly swaying, right arms bent toward their faces. As EHSXN and Reza R’s techno-infused score grows in intensity, so does the movement, with tantalizing gradualness. According to the FTA website, the 45-minute Shiraz pays homage to Iran’s now-defunct Shiraz Arts Festival, which ran from 1967 to 1977 — and the immaculately calm vibes do indeed feel transmitted from another, more grounded time. I’m unsurprised to see the piece is already booked to play in 13 more cities across the world during the next few months.
The rapturous Hatched Ensemble adopts a busier visual approach. Choreographed by Mamela Nyamza, from South Africa, the 75-minute piece interrogates ballet’s oppressive culture, while harnessing aspects of the form’s kinetic power. After spending many minutes on the floor in a clump, tenderly swaying to a recording of Saint-Saëns’ serene “The Swan,” a sizeable, all-Black ensemble of bare-chested dancers wearing long white clothespin-covered tutus begins briefly popping up en pointe. The movement becomes more vigorous, synchronizing with the slow ballooning of traditional African music, performed by multi-instrumentalist Given “Azah” Mphago and opera singer Litho Nqai. Eventually, the dancers throw off their ballet gear and don sharp red jackets. The lights rise on the audience, and the performers suppress laughter as they cheekily stare us down. Near the show’s end, footlights illuminate sculptures of wildlife, including a rhinoceros — not so different from a unicorn, if you squint.
All the above productions have closed, but the Festival TransAmériques runs until June 5 in Montreal. More information is available here.
Festival TransAmériques generously sponsored travel and accommodation for Intermission’s review coverage of the festival.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. His writing has appeared in publications like Maisonneuve, This, and NEXT. He loves the original Super Mario game very much.
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