FIAF Launches 2015 Crossing the Line Festival with 'Suite N°2' This Week

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and the Hermès Foundation's New Settings program are thrilled to launch FIAF's 2015 Crossing the Line festival with the U.S. premiere of Suite n°2 from French director Joris Lacoste. In Suite n°2, an uproarious and poignant performance emerges from the simplest of sources-the spoken word.

Suite n°2 features a group of five performers who overlay and intertwine entries from Lacoste's Encyclopédie de la parole-a vast online archive of voice recordings-in a virtuosic performance that decontextualizes speech into iconic mementos of civilization. Spanning the banal, the political, the intimate, and the public, this playful and compelling performance amplifies every hesitation, intonation, and utterance of human expression beyond words.

Lacoste's L'Encyclopédie de la parole explores the spoken word in all its forms. Since 2007, this group of musicians, poets, directors, visual artists, actors, sociolinguists, and curators have been collecting an abundance of recordings of speech and then indexing them on its website according to their particular properties or phenomena such as cadence, chorality, emphasis, saturation or melody.

The collection, which now includes about 800 sound documents, is incredibly varied and includes the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, a lecture by Jacques Lacan, an excerpt from South Park, the flow of Eminem, a message left on an answering machine, a TV game show, an Adventist sermon, an excerpt from The Young and the Restless, a speech by Bill Clinton, an auctioneer selling horses, a commercial for shampoo, and the casual conversations recorded in the local café, to name only a few. Visit encyclopediedelaparole.org for more information and to experience the interactive platform.

Performances of Suite n°2 will take place this weekend, September 10 and 11 at FIAF's Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022. Tickets are $25 ($20 for FIAF members) and can be purchased at fiaf.org or by phone at 1-800-982-2787. Suite n°2 is performed in multiple languages with English supertitles.

Joris Lacoste was born in 1973 and lives and works in Paris. He has been writing for theater and radio since 1996 and has been conducting his own performances since 2003. He also created 9 lyriques pour actrice et caisse claire in 2005 with Stéphanie Béghain at the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, and Purgatoire at the Théâtre National de la Colline in 2007, for which he was also an associate author. From 2007 to 2009, he was co-director of Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers. He initiated two collective projects, project W in 2004 and the Encyclopédie de la parole in 2007, resulting notably in 2009 in the solo Parlement, starring Emmanuelle Lafon.

In 2009 he launched the project Hypnographie to explore the artistic uses of hypnosis: in this context he produced the radio play Au Musée du sommeil (2009), the exhibition-performance Le Cabinet d'hypnose (2010), the exhibition 12 prepared dreams (GB Agency Paris 2012), the theater piece Le vrai spectacle (2011), the performances Restitution (2010), La maison vide (2012), and 4 prepared dreams (for April March, Jonathan Caouette, Tony Conrad and Annie Dorsen), which was presented at FIAF's Crossing the Line festivalin New York in October 2012. Visit jorislacoste.net for more information.

Merci!

Suite n°2 is co-presented with the Hermès Foundation's (Fondation d'entreprise Hermès) New Settings program. Supported by the Institut français, FACE Foundation, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Crossing the Line 2015 is made possible with the generous support of The Hermès Foundation's (Fondation d'entreprise Hermès) New Settings program; Lead Sponsors Air France and Delta Air Lines, the official airlines of FIAF; Florence Gould Foundation; and JC Decaux; and Sponsors Melissa Shoes, Nespresso, and Pommery.

Our Producer's Circle: Ron Guttman, Isabelle Kowal, Elizabeth Krief Manardo, Tom McCarthy and Violaine Huisman, Virginia A. Millheiser, Marie Nugent-Head, and Elisabeth Wilmers.

FIAF would like to thank the following for their generous support of Crossing the Line 2015:

Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Enoch Foundation; European Research Council; FACE; Institut français; Italian Cultural Institute New York; King's Fountain; NYSCA; NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Robert de Rothschild; SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques); and The Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

About the Partnership between Crossing the Line and the Hermès Foundation's (Fondation d'entreprise Hermès) New Settings program

Crossing the Line is thrilled to partner with the Hermès Foundation (Fondation d'entreprise Hermès)'s New Settings program for a third consecutive year. Launched in 2011, this program supports new performing arts productions that involve collaboration and creative dialogue between artists from the performing and visual arts. This year works by the following artists are presented as part of the New Settings program within the framework of Crossing the Line: Joris Lacoste's Suite n°2 and Ali Moini's Lives.

About Crossing the Line

Crossing the Line is the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)'s annual fall festival, presenting interdisciplinary works and performances in New York. The festival explores the dialogue between artist and public, and examines how artists help re-imagine the world as critical thinkers and catalysts for social evolution. Crossing the Line is initiated and produced by FIAF in partnership with leading cultural institutions. The festival's ninth edition takes place this year from September 10-October 4, 2015.

France has a long history of supporting national and international cultural practices, welcoming and nurturing new ideas and influential perspectives from around the world. FIAF, as the leading French cultural institution in the US, critically maintains that tradition through the Crossing the Line festival, presenting leading edge artists from France and the US alongside their peers from around the world.

Since its inauguration in 2007, Crossing the Line has cultivated an increasingly large and diverse following, and received numerous accolades in the press. The festival has been voted "Best of 2009," "Best of 2010," "Best of 2012," "Best of 2013," and "Best of 2014" by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York, Artforum, and Frieze, with performances earning an Obie and several Bessie awards. The New York Times states, "For terrifically unusual, unpredictable, unnameable performance, we've come to expect a lot from ... the curators of the French Institute Alliance Française's interdisciplinary festival," and The New Yorker says, "This interdisciplinary festival...goes from strength to strength." For more information, visit fiaf.org/ctl.