As the United States turns its behemoth back on the rest of the world and defunds those entities that don’t follow suit, including the proverbial underfunded arts organizations, it’s good to have Canada nearby. “Standing apart from the prevailing cynicism of our time,” Montreal’s two-week Festival TransAmériques not only spans the globe in 20 productions of theater and dance, but even conceives migration as a creative force. For this 19th edition, choreographers have fashioned idioms from home—Iran, Jamaica, Rwanda, Burkina Faso—by way of Berlin, Oslo, Marseille, and Brussels. Even the festival’s host city comes into focus by way of its immigrant margins. While several choreographers—Dorothée Munyaneza, Armin Hokmi, Mamela Nyamza, Serge Aimé Coulibaly—appear regularly on a presenting circuit that extends from South Korea to Norway, North America has largely fallen out of their orbit. For Canada, though, they’re still making the trip. —Apollinaire Scherr