The Theatre Festival of the Americas, launched in the summer of 1985. attempts to bring this huge continent – perhaps too often preoccupied with looking back to European and other antecedents – into mutual self-awareness: between North America and South, and between both hemispheres and the newly-assertive states of Central America. Josette Feral, currently teaching in the Département de Théâtre at the Université du Québec in Montreal, reports on the companies represented at the inaugural festival, and at what their work seems to suggest about present preoccupations and potential cross-fertilization.