FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival to Feature HOT BOX in September

As part of the sixth edition of FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York's premiere French cultural center, and The Chocolate Factory present the world premiere of Hot Box, fromBrian Rogers. Hot Box is a loud, dark, drunken live performance (and endurance challenge) that takes inspiration from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo-particularly the extreme physical trials the actors underwent in order to create a genuine experience on screen. Hot Box features dancer Madeline Best and non-performer Rogers, taking center stage in his own work for the first time.

 

Performances of Hot Box will take place September 13–22 (see schedule above) at The Chocolate Factory. Critics are welcome as ofSeptember 14 for an official opening on September 15. The running time is approximately 60 minutes with no intermission. The Chocolate Factory is located at 5-49 49th Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. Tickets, which are $15, are available online atwww.fiaf.org/ctl and by phone at 212.352.3101. 

 

Created as a companion piece to Rogers' critically-acclaimed Selective Memory (2010/11), Hot Box begins hours before the audience enters the crypt-like basement space at The Chocolate Factory. Rogers and Best will enact a strenuous series of physical tasks, part choreography and part exercise, while drinking alcohol. Much alcohol. When the audience arrives at 8pm, Rogers and Best will be considerably drunk and extremely exhausted. Then the performance will begin. 

 

Divided into two viewing areas, the audience will witness real-time projected images of Rogers and Best via a live video feed. Using live interactive video technology as its primary vehicle of expression, Hot Box expands Selective Memory's use of tightly choreographed pans, zooms, and cuts. Disjointed sounds will accompany the images to create a violent, noisy, and chaotic sense of disorder. Within this frenzied environment, Rogers and Best will attempt to create a focused stillness, a place where the audience can view a body coated with an intense physical and emotional residue. At some point, the original, extreme, physical actions, and drinking will begin again and the performers' stillness will try to exist amidst the mayhem.

 

In addition to creating original work since 1997, Brian Rogers co-founded and serves as artistic director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, which is "one of the most vital arts organizations in Queens," (The New York Times, 2010) and "has become a leader among a new generation of scrappy, homespun artist-run spaces and is viewed by some as the spiritual heir to bigger, more entrenched institutions." (The New York Times, 2010).