The Festival TransAmériques Dance + Theater in Montreal, the most experimental event of the year, began last night on Thursday, May 29, 2026. Through June 10, Montreal’s theaters will host theater and dance companies for performances and experimental works that lend an air of mystery and an exciting sense of creativity amid the last rains of spring.
Last night, we got the festival off to a great start with a very special performance by the New York-based company Elevator Repair Service— Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge.
Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge
In the black-box theater of the Cinquième Salle at Place des Arts, the theater company Elevator Repair Service set up two lecterns, just as they did in Cambridge in 1965. The text is drawn from a verbal exchange performed verbatim, a debate on the theme: Has the American Dream been realized at the expense of Black Americans?
On one side, writer James Baldwin, and on the other, conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. Like the company’s other experimental theatrical works, the text and its authenticity, brilliantly reimagined in our modern context, take on new meaning.
The theme of the debate, a version of a question that has kept Americans and the world awake for as long as anyone can remember, strikes a nerve regarding systemic racism (which wasn’t called that in the 1960s), colonization, American exceptionalism, and the justification of social inequalities by claiming that “some people don’t work hard enough.”
James Baldwin’s eloquence still has the same effect—elegance and quiet strength—he was a pastor in his youth, and you can feel it—and the weight of his anger still carries just as much weight. Buckley’s counterargument bears an ugly resemblance to that of today’s American nationalists.
You can catch the play through the end of the weekend; there are four performances before June 1. To get a ticket, click here!
The FTA
The Festival TransAmériques features nearly 30 dance and theater performances—and everything in between—and we recommend grabbing a ticket for a show even if you don’t really know what you’re going to see. There’s a lot of beauty in the unknown at the FTA