Festival TransAmériques 2025 will stage 20 fierce shows in Montreal from May 22 to June 5

Festival TransAmériques (FTA) 2025 will showcase the work of 200 choreographers, directors, performers and designers from 23 countries, presenting “multiple visions of the world through powerful, moving and sometimes disturbing dance and theatre shows.”

Here are our highlights from the lineup of the 19th edition of FTA, happening at venues around the city from May 22 to June 5.

Hatched Ensemble

Tutus, en pointe, bare-chested: 10 dancers face away, gently swaying to The Swan. But this is no ordinary ballet. As live music and song erupt onstage, bodies break free—from stillness, from gender, from the rigid codes of classical dance. Costumes change, feet descend, movement intensifies. White turns to red. South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza brings together a new generation of performers to rewrite ballet’s legacy. With Hatched Ensemble, she continues her decades-long mission to decolonize dance—recasting the form not as exclusive tradition, but as a shared, living, political force. The result: a radical reclamation of space, identity, and joy. Hatched Ensemble will be presented at Monument-National, Salle Ludger-Duvernay (1182 St-Laurent), May 23–24

Millepertuis

Millepertuis is a vibrant solo created for street dance virtuoso Walid Hammani (aka Waldo), blending intensity, elegance, and emotional depth. Between euphoria and stillness, flamboyant costumes, lighting, and soundscape reveal the dancer’s charisma while slowly exposing hidden vulnerability. Choreographed by Sovann Rochon-Prom Tep, the piece becomes a poetic unravelling—an introspective journey where exuberance gives way to tenderness, and a complex inner world is brought to light, where Hammani’s popping and electro dance blurs with fluid contemporary movement. Like the hypericum flower it’s named after, beauty and contradiction coexist in dazzling harmony. Millepertuis will be presented at Édifice Wilder Espace Bleu (1435 Bleury), May 23–June 2.

Toi, moi, Tituba…

In a forest of glowing neon, Dorothée Munyaneza conjures voices long silenced. Her solo performance calls forth Tituba—the enslaved Black woman at the heart of the Salem witch trials—and others like her, buried in colonial history. Every gesture becomes a vessel of resistance, each movement a quiet force of resurrection. Accompanied by musician Khyam Allami, Munyaneza creates a ritual of sound and presence, where body and voice reach beyond the stage. Inspired by Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba and Elsa Dorlin’s philosophical writings, this charged performance honours the spectral presence of the erased. Toi, moi, Tituba… is an invocation, an elegy, and a luminous act of historical reparation. Toi, moi, Tituba… will be presented at Place des Arts, Cinquième Salle (175 Ste-Catherine W.), May 27–29. 

AUTOGYNEGAMY

In the stunning setting of Très-Saint-Rédempteur church, Montreal icon Elle Barbara stages her own rebirth. AUTOGYNEGAMY is a radical, genre-defying performance blending dance, music, multimedia, and revisionist Bible tales into a dazzling spectacle of transformation. Presided over by a priest-narrator, the work reframes Barbara’s gender transition as a sacred rite, brought to life by a cast of professional and amateur dancers in a joyous, extravagant celebration. Wedding ritual becomes self-marriage — a triumphant declaration of self-love and liberation from the “queen of Montreal” herself. AUTOGYNEGAMY will be presented at Théâtre Adam (3530 Adam), May 28-31

Batty Bwoy

Seductive, grotesque, and defiantly playful, Batty Bwoy reclaims a slur to stage a queer myth-making of the body. Choreographer-performer Harald Beharie crafts a shifting creature—at once tender and threatening, erotic and monstrous—tugging at the tangled threads of desire, identity, and power. Set to a soundscape of droning prog-rock, the solo work weaves Jamaican and Norwegian references into a flamboyant fugue of movement. Drawing from giallo films, homophobic dancehall, resilient gully queens, and queer fantasy, Batty Bwoy revels in the body’s contradictions. Beharie turns “batty energy” into a space of resistance and radical imagination. Batty Bwoy will be presented at Monument-National Studio Hydro-Québec (1182 St-Laurent), May 28–31. 

Concerto

A performance where movement meets language, concerto is an experimental duet by choreographer Charlie Khalil Prince and writer Olivia Tapiero. Words and bodies collide, echo, and rupture in a space shaped by rhythm and resonance. Blurring the lines between poetry and performance, concerto explores the fragility of expression and the tension between silence and articulation, each gesture and phrase becoming part of an unstable, haunting score. Concerto will be presented at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (3700 St-Dominique), May 29–June 1

Un-nevering

Can collaboration continue after loss? In Un-nevering, choreographer Thea Patterson explores grief and presence through movement and memory, following the sudden, unsolved death of her partner and artistic collaborator Jeremy Gordaneer. With collaborators Rachel Harris and Elinor Fueter, Patterson creates a performative installation where objects — ropes, pulleys, boxing gloves — come alive in a sonic and visual dialogue. A luminous act of care and connection, Un-nevering is not just a tribute, but a living conversation with absence. Un-nerving will be presented at Espace Libre (1945 Fullum), May 30–June 3.

Pompières et pyromanes

The world is burning — how do we douse the flames without smothering what still gives us life? Pompières et pyromanes brings Martine Delvaux’s incendiary feminist essay to the stage in a riot of sound, fury, and fragile hope. Under the looming presence of a massive slide borrowed from the BGL collective — symbol of collapse and potential rebirth — eight citizen-artists and a Quebec Sign Language interpreter chart a collective response to crisis. Smoke, alarms, punk riffs, and heartfelt letters collide in this raw, unruly, intergenerational performance. With found objects, collage, and fearless tenderness, Bureau de l’APA invites us to rethink the world — and our place in saving it. Pompières et pyromanes will be presented at La Maison Théâtre (245 Ontario E.), May 30–June 1

danses vagabondes

A white screen. A flash of motion. Louise Lecavalier erupts into view — intensity distilled into pure momentum. In Danses vagabondes, she channels the restless spirit of the wanderer: a figure who answers to no one, propelled by a primal urge for movement and freedom. Drawing on stories of resistance and refusal, Lecavalier weaves a blazing solo of transformation. Her body becomes a vessel of rhythm and revolt, slipping between identities and states of being. Through her radiant presence, a strange electricity pulses between stage and audience — stirring our own unquiet impulses, our secret escapes. danses vagabondes will be presented at Usine C (1345 Lalonde), May 31–June 4

C la vie

A red circle blazes at the centre of the stage, framed by a shimmering curtain. Eight performers from Faso Danse Théâtre confront one another and the world in C la vie, a fierce new work by Serge Aimé Coulibaly. Rooted in Burkinabe traditions and shaped by global uprisings, the choreography channels ancestral memory and collective desire into unstoppable motion. Through explosive movement, masks, trance, song, and resistance, C la vie invites us to question power and imagine new dimensions of existence. Between past and present, living and ancestral, this is dance as revolt—and as celebration. Free admission! C la vie will be presented at Théâtre de Verdure (3939 Parc-La-Fontaine), June 4–5

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For more on the 2025 edition of Festival TransAmériques, please visit their website.

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