A New Haven, A Shared Stage
The opening of a new theatre venue, ANY new venue in Montreal, is cause for celebration. It's fitting, then, that Teesri Duniya Theatre has chosen to inaugurate their new space with a festival of three powerful pieces.
Marking their 45th anniversary, Teesri’s Season of the Migrant comes alive with the Backyard Theatre Festival, a bare-bones, eco-sensitive event spanning three weekends and nine nights. Rejecting wasteful excess, the festival strips back the spectacle to prioritize human creativity, voice, movement, and imagination, utilizing repurposed and found objects to leave the lightest possible footprint on the environment.
Discussing the opening of this venue with Teesri’s Artistic Director Rahul Varma, he tells me, “In the theatre, we perform our work as an artist on the stage. And there are nine companies that I know, English-speaking, and what we’re missing is a performance space. And that’s ironic. We have the arts councils who want to support the art, but they have not given us an opportunity to afford a space to present. So there are, at least for English-speaking companies, and for independent theatres, there are only a few spaces. There’s Centaur, which only does big productions, and the Segal Centre, which also only does big productions. MAI does activities throughout the year, but outside of that there are no real stages. So I had this mission to find a performance space for us, and we ended up in this place, Cité-des-Hospitalières. There’s a big space available here, 125 seats, but it’s not sufficient. It’s for us, and a few invited companies. The vitality of the theatre is sitting in the actions of independent smaller groups who do not have the infrastructure. They’re absolutely vital, they give us life. My intention was to create a theatre space for those people. It’s a shared space.”
At its core, the festival explores the multi-faceted experiences and contributions of migrants, from individual stories of resilience to the pivotal ways migrant communities shape Canada's social, cultural, and political fabric.
Here is what’s coming to the Backyard Theatre this September:
The Food/Famine Tour
Dates: September 3–5, 2026
Created & Directed by: Anne-Marie St-Louis (presented by the P.A.I.N. collective)
Developed with Teesri Duniya since 2023, this multidisciplinary play reimagines the traditional "walking food tour." Rooted in the political and personal dimensions of food, specifically bread, the performance combines choral work, storytelling, dance, photography, performance, and music across the theatre's backyard and outdoor spaces. Inspired by the starvation in Gaza, growing food-bank lines, and the urgent need for school food programs, The Food/Famine Tour tackles who gets access to food, who is left without, and what sustenance reveals about power, inequality, and dignity.
Speaking with creator Anne-Marie St-Louis, I asked her to elaborate on what to expect from the opening show of the festival. Using the expansive backyard itself, rather than the stage of the new venue, The Food/Famine Tour will bring audiences on a physical and spiritual journey, as the production is staged to resemble a walking tour. “It's a roaming performance and made of six different numbers that all explore bread as a central metaphor, but seen through a multitude of lenses. So we have some familial, personal stories. We have stories of bread in the context of someone who's immigrated, bread in the context of someone who's struggling to make rent, and then bread in the context of someone who has body issues.”
Opening a new venue, and the festival itself, I asked Anne-Marie what she was most looking forward to.
“I am really drawn to some of the ritual aspects of theatre, like coming together and sitting together and listening together to stories. I'm really looking forward to meeting the audience, even if it's a small group, just sharing that time together outside, you know? It feels like the most intimate, sit-by-the-campfire show I've done. So I'm really excited to share that with whoever comes, and with my fellow creators and the other people in the festival. I think it's really cool that it's a part of a festival, and I feel like that makes total sense. There's that sense of belonging. I'm looking forward to sharing those moments.”
Echoes in the Streets
Dates: September 10–12, 2026
Devised & Directed by: Abi Sanie
Tracing fifty years of student protest in Montreal, Echoes in the Streets reframes the city as a living archive of dissent. Blending documentary performance, archival sound, and movement, the piece draws on youth-led student encampments and historical uprisings to show how young people have continuously reshaped public space through resistance, creativity, and collective action. It is a powerful exploration of youth who refuse to stay silent and a call to examine how historic chants, strikes, and marches continue to echo through the city today.
With such a small footprint for the Backyard Theatre, I asked director Abi Sanie how the piece uses elements outside of traditional theatre tech to tell the story. “We have a very minimal set and prop situation. I have a background in object theatre, so I can't help but use stuff sometimes. So we definitely have some of the object theatre influence in the piece. But sound is really the main technical element that's bringing us along in the story. Jeremy Lewis is our composer, and he's normally on stage in Montreal as a performer, but he also has a background in classical music and composition, as well as a current career as a rapper. And so Jeremy is coming on to help us use sound. To bring us along in the story, because we're not really using lights other than to make sure we can see the performers clearly. We will probably be getting our audience up and bringing them into the garden a little bit, as well. But our main technical and design element is going to be in the sound.”
Migratory Birds
Dates: September 17–19, 2026
Created by: Yunta Clan Collective (Led by Cristina Alejandra Jiménez Gómez)
Closing out the festival, Migratory Birds follows three Latin American immigrants navigating life, displacement, and belonging in a new city. The play dives into their relationships with non-human species, labor dynamics, solitude, language politics, and nostalgia while questioning who actually gets to feel included in this new world. Through lived experiences, the characters grapple with cultural shifts to forge connections of love and solidarity, highlighting their ongoing commitment to the lands they now inhabit and the work toward decolonization.
Unlike the first two productions, Migratory Birds actually takes place inside, next to the Backyard Theatre. This is to suit the production itself, as it was developed as an indoor piece, but this also moves the festival from the inauguration of a new, outdoor venue, to a celebration of unconventional theatre.
When I asked how the production benefits from being staged inside, in a small room adjacent to the Backyard Theatre itself, Cristina Alejandra Jiménez Gómez elaborates. “I come from a history of street theatre. In my country, I used to do a lot of street theatre, and what I found super interesting about this relationship with the audience is that it's not necessarily a hierarchical relationship, but instead, it's a co-creative space. So I love the fact that we can be close, as close as they allow us to be. And in the case of Migratory Birds, this play is… it's intimate. And it’s the one with the smallest audience, also. So it will be an experience of closeness, I think. That's something that we want to bring to the audiences.”
When asked what both artists were looking forward to most, they both expressed their excitement to work with the other artists in the festival, to feel like part of something larger. “I’m looking forward to seeing the community and the Teesri audiences together again. I think there's something really special about an artistic, radically political, intergenerational community. It’s a very rare thing to find in the world, but it's something that Teesri has done a lot of work to foster. I always love the conversations that we get to have with the people who have been seeing Teesri shows for two years, five years, ten years, longer than that. Talking about how things have evolved and how the company and the mandate keeps growing,” Abi added.
Ultimately, the Backyard Theatre Festival isn’t just an inauguration of a new stage, it’s an antidote to the ongoing space crisis squeezing Montreal’s independent arts scene. By stripping away non-essential production elements and focusing on sustainable, grassroots storytelling, Teesri Duniya is creating a new haven for the city’s independent, marginalized, and politically radical voices. Whether you're breaking bread under the open sky, tracing the living history of local student resistance, or sharing an intimate room with stories of migration and belonging, this festival is a reminder of what theatre can achieve when community comes first. Grab your tickets and come witness the start of a whole new chapter for underground Montreal theatre.
The Backyard Theatre Festival
Teesri-Duniya Theatre Company
The Backyard Theater, Cité-des-Hospitalières, 251 av. des Pins Ouest, H2W 1R6 Montréal
3-5 September - 7:00 PM - The Food/Famine Tour
Information: https://teesriduniyatheatre.com/project/the-food-famine-tour/
Tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/the-food-famine-tour
10-12 September - 7:00 PM - Echoes in the Streets
Information: https://teesriduniyatheatre.com/project/echoes-in-the-streets/
Tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/8c5f83e2-65e3-4505-b516-27438b74d06b
17-19 September - 7:00 PM - Migratory Birds
Information: https://teesriduniyatheatre.com/project/migratory-birds/
Tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/migratory-birds
