FIAF Presents Lecture/Performance Series, Begins 9/20

As part of Crossing the Line 2011, its annual transdisciplinary festival of contemporary arts, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) presents the Lecture/Performance Series: information as performance, and vice-versa.

Defying the conventions of the lecture as simply a source of knowledge and the performance as a highly subjective presentation of a way of seeing the world, the Lecture/Performance Series offers artists a fertile and ambiguous landscape to explore and convey ideas in an engaging and inspiring way. Often with a minimum of means, this format has proven to be highly stimulating for both the artist and audience alike. Presented throughout the four weeks of the festival, this new series is one of Crossing the Line 2011's three curatorial programming perspectives.

Featured in this series is work by:

Xavier Le Roy-molecular biologist turned ground-breaking choreographer
Jos Houben-Belgian actor and master of laughter and physical comedy
Ralph Lemon-acclaimed American choreographer, visual artist, writer, and performer
Gérald Kurdian-French performer, songwriter, and radio artist

Lecture/Performance Series

Xavier Le Roy, Product of Circumstances

Tuesday, September 20, 7:30pm, FIAF's Tinker Auditorium

Biologist turned ground-breaking choreographer Xavier Le Roy uses the "illustrated lecture" form to take audiences through his professional journey from scientist to dance maker. He offers perspectives on the politics and power structures that determine what research really gets done within institutions, and engagingly examines the assumptions that frequently determine choices made in the performing arts world.

Jos Houben, The Art of Laughter (U.S. Premiere)

Tuesday, September 27, 7:30pm, Florence Gould Hall at FIAF

This hilarious and enlightening lecture/performance by the Belgian actor and master of laughter and physical comedy explores the causes and effects of laughter and the role the body plays in its creation. A graduate of Paris' renowned Jacques Le Coq school of physical theater, Jos Houben dissects the mechanics that trigger laughter, considering facial expressions, the idiosyncrasies of the human body, the act of falling down, and the importance of timing. An amusing and delightful one-man master class on one of life's greatest pleasures.
Ralph Lemon, A Paradance: The inherent protest and émigré nature of performance (and how it could belong nowhere) (World premiere)
Thursday, October 6, 7:30pm at Tinker Auditorium at FIAF

Ralph Lemon is an acclaimed dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist whose work addresses social and political issues in an elusive, striking, emotional, and powerful way through his poignant use of diverse artistic forms. He currently serves as the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation.

Gérald Kurdian: 1999 (U.S. Premiere)
Wednesday, October 12, 7:30pm at Le Skyroom at FIAF
The Paris-based French performer, songwriter, and radio artist presents a lo-fi performance on space-operas composed of forty-eight episodes of the British science-fiction TV series Space 1999. The work offers musical elements defined in relation to the producers' roles in the music industry from performer and composer to manager and artistic director, and prompts the audience to re-consider their understanding of the musical spectacle.

About Jos Houben
Jos Houben studied at Paris' Jacques Lecoq school of physical theater with Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, and Pierre Byland. An original member of the "Théâtre Complicité," he helped to create and performed in the famous A Minute Too Late, a 1985 vaudeville production that deeply influenced the theater scene in the United Kingdom. Since then, he has worked on many other projects with the company. He wrote and directed the absurd-burlesque cult comic duo, The Right Size (Winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Show in 1999 and Best New Comedy in 2002), which played in the West End in London and on Broadway in New York. Alsoin the U.K., he co-produced and performed in several burlesque television programs and series that were distributed globally to great success, including Mr Fixit for Thames TV and Brum for Ragdoll Productions.

In France, as an actor, Jos Houben has collaborated regularly with the contemporary composer George Aperghis on Commentaires (Paris/Avignon, 1996), Zwielicht (Munich, 1999), and Paysage sous Surveillance (Brussels, 2003). In 2008, he performed in Samuel Beckett's Fragments, directed by Peter Brook. Recently, he collaborated with La Comédie Française and worked with French theater director Jean-François Peyret.

Houben is currently working on a new piece with BErnie Collins that will be presented as part of his residency at La Ferme du Buisson. Houben also teaches and consults for theater and opera companies, schools, circuses, international organizations, universities, festivals, dance schools, and magicians worldwide, and has taught at the Jacques Lecoq school since 2000.

About Gérald Kurdian
Performer, songwriter, and radio artist Gérald Kurdian studied visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy before taking part in the EX.E.R.CE 07 contemporary dance program directed by Mathilde Monnier and Xavier Le Roy. His musical performances have been presented at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Centre Pompidou in Metz, the MDT in Stockholm, the Lieu Unique in Nantes, and at the Inaccoutumés, Steirischer Herbst, Tupp, and Uzès dance festivals.

Kurdian has collaborated with Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, Xavier Le Roy, Eleanor Bauer, and Juan Dominguez as a musician and dramaturge.

From 2006 to 2010, he collaborated with Radio France's Atelier de Création Radiophonique, and produced several radio pieces involving sound composition and documentary, including Je suis putain (2006), 6 mois, 1 lieu et le comportement de l'ensemble (2009), and Archive Now (2010). Together with Caroline Masini, Kurdian was awarded the Phonurgia Nova research grant in 2010 for their musical Menace, Fantômes. Additionally, he composes love songs for This is the hello monster !, his avant-pop solo band. Their debut album was selected as one of the Best Albums of the Year by the French newspaper Libération.

About Xavier Le Roy
Over the last decade, choreographer Xavier Le Roy has opened up new perspectives in the world of dance. Trained as a molecular biologist, he approaches his work almost ‘scientifically,' starting with a single idea or question. Exploring the human body and how we perceive it, Xavier Le Roy defies categorization as a dance maker.

Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier (France), and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. From 1996 to 2003, he was an artist-in-residence at the Podewil in Berlin. In 2007-2008, he was "Associated Artist" at the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier. In 2010, Le Roy was an Artist-in-Residence fellow at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology (Cambridge, MA).

Through his solo works, including Self Unfinished (1998) and Product of Circumstances (1999), Le Roy has radicalized academic discourse about the body and choreographic art. Xavier Le Roy develops his work like a researcher, while simultaneously focusing on the relationships between process and product and his own involvement in the process. He regularly initiates projects to question modes of production, collaboration, and conditions of group work with projects such as E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. (1999-2000), Project (2003), and 6 Months 1 Location (2008). His latest works, including the solos Le Sacre du Printemps (2007) and Product of Other Circumstances (2009), as well as the group piece low pieces (2009-2011), explore more explicitly the diverse modes of relationships between spectators and performers. www.xavierleroy.com

About Ralph Lemon
Ralph Lemon is Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon builds teams of collaborating artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, countries and artistic disciplines, and each brings their own history and aesthetic voices to the work. Projects develop over a period of years, with public sharings of work-in-progress, culminating in artworks derived from the artistic, cultural, historic, and emotional material uncovered in this rigorous creative research process.

In 2005, Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy, a decade-long international research and performance project exploring the "conceptual materials" of race, history, memory, and the creative practice. The project featured three dance/theater performances: Geography (1997), Tree (2000), and Come home Charley Patton (2004); two Internet art projects; several gallery exhibitions; the publication of two books by Wesleyan University Press, with a third to be published in 2011. Other recent projects include the three-DVD set of The Geography Trilogy; a web-installation (www.ralphlemon.net); a 2009 multimedia performance commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Rescuing the Princess; and Lemon's most recent multimedia project How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?

Lemon was one of fifty artists to receive the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He has received two Bessie Awards (NY Dance and Performance), a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Prize for Choreography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2004 Fellowship with the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In 1999, Lemon was honored with the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. Lemon has been artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia (2005-06); George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); and a Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University (2002). From 1996-2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre. Most recently he was an IDA fellow at Stanford University.

Lemon's solo visual art exhibitions include: How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, New York (2007) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, New York (2000); and Geography, Art Awareness, Lexington, New York (1997). Group exhibitions include: Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2010-11) and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. In January 2011, Lemon performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with the exhibition, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.

Merci!
FIAF would like to thank the following for their generous support of Crossing the Line 2011:

American Airlines, the Official Airline of FIAF; 972, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Institut français; Florence Gould Foundation; Robert de Rothschild; National Endowment for the Arts; FACE: French American Cultural Exchange; Etant donnes: The French American Fund for the Performing Arts; FUSED: French U.S. Exchange in Dance; New England Foundation for the Arts; Nespresso; BNP Paribas; Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts; The Lowell Hotel. Special thanks to Arizona State University.

About Crossing the Line
Crossing the Line, FIAF's fall festival, is conceived as a platform to present vibrant new works by a diverse range of trans-disciplinary artists who are transforming and furthering cultural and artistic practices on both sides of the Atlantic. It is conceived, initiated, and produced by FIAF in partnership with leading New York cultural institutions, and runs this year from September 17-October 16, 2011.

Inaugurated in 2007, Crossing the Line has enjoyed increasingly strong audience response from diverse segments of the New York City area, as well as prestigious critical acclaim. The festival has been voted "Best of 2009" and "Best of 2010" by Time Out New York, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times wrote: "One of the fall's most exciting and thought-provoking performance events" (2008) and "The city should have a party for the French Institute Alliance Française for giving it this wonderful interdisciplinary festival" (2009).

The fifth edition is co-curated by Lili Chopra, Artistic Director at FIAF, and Simon Dove, Director, Herberger Institute School of Dance at Arizona State University, and focuses around three principal programming perspectives: Fiction & Non-Fiction; Lecture/Performance Series; Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration. A number of the programs will utilize FIAF's own spaces, including Florence Gould Hall, the FIAF Gallery, Tinker Auditorium, and Le Skyroom. Established partners in New York City will also host events, including Anthology Film Archives, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Danspace Project, The Invisible Dog Center, The Kitchen, The Lowell Hotel, New York Department of Parks & Recreation, New York Live Arts, Performance Space 122, Performing Garage, the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, and Van Cortlandt Park. www.fiaf.org/crossingtheline

About FIAF

FIAF's mission is to create and offer New Yorkers innovative and unique programs in education and the arts that explore the evolving diversity and richness of French cultures. FIAF seeks to generate new ideas and promote cross-cultural dialogue through partnerships and new platforms of expression. www.fiaf.org