FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival 2018 Presents 12 Premieres Transcending Discipline, Nationality, and Language
By: A.A. Cristi Aug. 01, 2018
The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York's premier French cultural institution, today announced Crossing The Line Festival 2018, featuring leading International Artists in a wide-ranging program of events, performances, and exhibitions from September 18 to October 13, 2018. Tickets are now available at crossingthelinefestival.org.
Each year, Crossing The Line presents works that transcend nationality, language, and discipline. The twelfth edition of the festival features twelve artists and ensembles from more than nine countries in seven venues across New York, including a dozen world, US, and NY premieres.
"From sharing the influence of female visionaries from France to a play that asks us what is art, this year's Crossing The Line Festival engages with pertinent questions facing our society and allows us to build a deeper understanding across perceived boundaries," Marie-Monique Steckel, President of FIAF said.
The year's festival is centered on several major new works by leading choreographers. It opens on September 18 at The Kitchen with the NY premiere of Caen Amour, a piece by New Yorker Trajal Harrell who was inspired by late 19th-century hoochie-koochie shows and used them as a point of departure to investigate inherited prejudices and modes of objectification through dance. French choreographer Boris Charmatz's 10000 gestures, in which more than 20 dancers enact thousands of unique movements at a furious pace, receives its North American premiere co-presented by NYU Skirball (Sept. 27 and 28). Danish choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen dissects the dynamics of the body, sex, and desire in the US premiere of 21 pornographies at Performance Space New York (Oct. 3-5). Zimbabwe-born, New York-based artist nora chipaumire, whose sold-out performances at the 2013 and 2017 Crossing The Line Festivals showcased her iconoclastic voice and urgent themes, will perform the world premiere of the completed trilogy #Punk 100% Pop *N!GGA in three marathon performances at The Kitchen (Oct. 11-13).
What Remains, a collaboration between choreographer Will Rawls, poet Claudia Rankine, and video artist John Lucas receives its New York City premiere at Danspace Project (Sept. 25 and 27-29). For this commission, the artists, who are all American, were asked to respond to the role of the surveillance state and the violence it inflicts upon its citizens. And on Sept 26, the Mivos Quartet premieres a new perception-bending work by New York-based French composer Leila Bordreuil at ISSUE Project Room.
FIAF's venues will be activated with performances by artists employing spoken and written language in creative, provocative, and poignant ways. Yasmina Reza's award-winning play Art will be revived in a surprising and illuminating production by the Belgian and Dutch theater collectives, tg STAN and Dood Paard, respectively, at Florence Gould Hall (Oct. 4-6). Drawing from his experience of his mother's death French theater maker Mohamed El Khatib has created a theatrical meditation on loss in A Beautiful Ending, which combines his personal mourning with his experience of losing his native language (Sept. 22). In FIAF's Le Skyroom, David Geselson of France leads his participatory project Unwritten Letters in which he writes the personal missives for strangers who for one reason or another never penned them. That evening, he will present these epistles in a performance by Compagnie Lieux-Dits (Sept. 22). French film star Jeanne Balibar will close the festival with the world premiere of her one-woman show, Les Historiennes, a deeply personal project that showcases the work of three trailblazing female historians (Oct. 13).
An exhibition by Paris-based Claudia Huidobro, a former fashion muse turned artist, challenges the role of beauty and exposes its tribal associations. Organized by curator François Hébel, the show will be on view in the FIAF Gallery from September 22 through the end of the festival.
For the third year, Crossing The Line will present BRIDGING: An International Dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts, spotlighting the work of Tunisian-French choreographer and activist Syhem Belkhodja. BRIDGING will manifest in a workshop for dancers incorporating on social justice issues into their practice at Gibney; a conversation with Belkhodja (Oct. 2); a symposium featuring discussions with esteemed curators, writers, and artists (Oct. 7); and a trio of performances by French-Algerian choreographer and dancer Nacera Belaza (Oct. 6-8).
This year's Crossing The Line Festival is the last to be curated by Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester. Founded by Chopra in 2007, the festival has brought international interdisciplinary work into the heart of New York culture and engaged a wide range of audiences across the city's boroughs. During Chopra, Dove, and Lester's eleven-year tenure, Crossing The Line has presented more than 100 premieres by a wide range of leading International Artists and companies. The directorship of the festival will pass to FIAF's new artistic director, who will be announced later this summer.
Chopra commented on the legacy of Crossing The Line: "We presented the work of artists we are passionate about. Produced by FIAF, together with our many presenting partners, we were able to imagine this platform with an immense sense of freedom, finding the right context for each artist's work across the city. This twelfth edition, our final one together as a curatorial team, is true to our core values of bringing artists that we find to be some of the most compelling international voices, pushing our sense of the possible, and how to be in the world right now. We are immensely grateful to all the extraordinary artists and partners who have made this festival possible, and we look forward to sharing these projects this fall!"
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CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2018 CHRONOLOGICAL LINEUP
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
Tuesday, September 18 and Wednesday, September 19 at 7pm and 9pm
Trajal Harrell returns to the Kitchen-where in 2014 he presented the entirety of his acclaimed Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church series-with the NY premiere of Caen Amour. His latest work reimagines the hoochie koochie, an erotic dance that was first popularized by the Syrian dancer Little Egypt. Her 1893 performance at the Chicago World's Fair spawned a number of imitators trying on an "oriental" style of dance. From the early 20th century through the 1980s, it was performed in traveling shows and fairs throughout the US. From the hoochie koochie's exoticizing, sexually objectifying foundations, Harrell writes that he mines for "forms of creative resistance between the cracks of history." So emerges a crossroads of a contemporary hoochie-koochie show, fashion runway, and dance laboratory; stage, catwalk, and dressing room; a museum piece and revisionist history. "Funny, affecting...ironic in tone, and visually like no other choreography you've seen" (The Guardian), Caen Amour takes audiences between the now and the then, into the murky depths of historical imagination.
Trajal Harrell is considered one of the most important choreographers of his generation. He gained widespread recognition for Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series, which asked, "What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?" In 2016, he completed a two-year Annenberg Residency at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he expanded his penchant for juxtaposing dance forms and turned his attention to the work of the Japanese founder of butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata. In this work, he looked at butoh through voguing's theoretical lens of "realness" and modern dance through the theoretical lens of butoh. Harrell has performed in American and international venues such as The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Walker Arts Center, LA's REDCAT, MoMA and MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, and events such as the Panorama Festival, Festival d'Avignon, Festival d'Automne, and Holland Festival.
Caen Amour is co-presented with The Kitchen.
CLAUDIA HUIDOBRO: FAITE MAIN (HAND MADE) (World Premiere)
FIAF Gallery
22 East 60th Street (between Park & Madison Avenues)
Gallery Hours: Monday through Friday 11am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm
Free and open to the public
Opening Reception Saturday, September 22 from 6-8pm
A muse to Jean Paul Gaultier and the greatest fashion photographers of her generation, artist Claudia Huidobro has developed an aesthetic practice that probes the cult of beauty and femininity. Through powerful images and performances, she chips away at the myth of perfection that she once helped perpetuate. For her third show in New York, Huidobro brings together photographs, collage, and work in various mediums in an exhibition organized specifically for the FIAF Gallery by curator François Hébel. Using dramatically enlarged cut-out images of combs, lipstick, torn pages of fashion magazines, elegantly posed hands, and scalpels, she creates a tribal arsenal, transforming these usually banal objects into potential weapons. They are juxtaposed with images pointing to the cult of the supposedly perfect woman.
Of Chilean heritage, Claudia Huidobro was born in Paris, France, where she currently lives and works. After studying art in school, her first contact with photography came through her modeling career during the 1980s, when she worked with famous photographers such as Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, and William Klein. She became a muse to Jean Paul Gaultier, working closely with him in his studio. In the 1990s, Huidobro quit the fashion world to dedicate herself to theater, music, and visual arts. Since 2000, her drawings, collages, and photographs have been exhibited from Chile to China, and at several fairs in Europe. This is her third presentation in New York, having most recently appeared in Olivier Saillard's performance "Models never talk," which was specially created for Crossing The Line in 2014.
This is the seventh exhibition of the French Protocol series in the FIAF Gallery, curated by François Hébel.
MOHAMED EL KHATIB: A BEAUTIFUL ENDING (NY Premiere)FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
Saturday, September 22 at 7pm
Free
In this poignant, sometimes humorous, and personal meditation on loss, writer and director Mohamed El Khatib reconstructs a written diary of sorts around the death of his mother in February 2012. Combining this autobiographical narrative with fictional elements, El Khatib fabricates a fragile reality constructed through the debris- interviews, emails, texts, documents, and additional sources-of his relationship with his mother. With the audience seated in close proximity to El Khatib, the solo performance takes the shape of an intimate confession or artistic testimony transmuted directly to the viewers. A Beautiful Ending was created in collaboration with Fred Hocké and Nicolas Jorio and received the 2016 Grand Prix de Littérature dramatique from ARTCENA (Centre national des arts du cirque, de la rue et du théâtre).
Mohamed El Khatib is an author, director, and performer based in France. His work has garnered success at important arts events such as the Festival d'Avignon. He attempts to confront drama with various media (films, installations, newspapers) and to observe the friction they produce. After studying literature, he attended CADAC (Dramatic Art Center of Mexico), and later received a Ph.D. in sociology focusing on "critique in the French press." He co-founded in 2008 the arts collective Zirlib on a simple premise: aesthetics aren't devoid of political intent. He is currently working on "Nowhere to Hide," a reflection on the notion of grief, which will last for the next 15 years. Since 2011, Mohamed El Khatib has been supported by the L'L in Brussels-where he has been developing research around capturing intimate experiences in writing and attempts to explore, to the point of exhaustion, different modes of anti-spectacular exposition.
A Beautiful Endingis supported by FACE Contemporary Theater, a program developed by FACE Foundation and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States with the support from the Florence Gould Foundation, Institut français-Paris, the French Ministry of Culture and private donors. Additional support for women artists has been provided by Fondation CHANEL.
DAVID GESELSON: UNWRITTEN LETTERS (US Premiere)
FIAF Le Skyroom
22 East 60th Street
Saturday, September 22 at 9pm
Free
David Geselson and his company Compagnie Lieux-Dits, stage a participatory theatrical experience, drawing on the power of memory, love, loss, and regret. Over the course of a full day, Geselson will individually meet with several people and ask them to describe a letter that they wish they had written to a loved one but never completed. Geselson will then compose a letter on behalf of each person, and with permission, Compagnie Lieux-Dits will present a work based on the approved epistles during an evening presentation in Le Skyroom. First produced at Théâtre de la Bastille in April 2016, this ongoing project has, according to Geselson, "bridged the gap between theater practitioners and their audience and transformed the theater into a shared space where these two worlds can meet and talk."
David Geselson is a writer, director, and actor based in Paris. Trained at the École du Théâtre National de Chaillot and the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique, Geselson both wrote and directed the plays Doreen (based on Lettre à D. by André Gorz) and En Route-Kaddish. Additionally, he directed Eli Eli by Thibault Vinçon and Les Insomniaques by Juan Mayorga. As an actor, Geselson performed in Tiago Rodrigues's Bovary at the Théâtre de la Bastille in spring 2016 as well as on tour. He has also appeared on stage in productions directed by Brigitte Jaques, Cécile Garcia-Fogel, Gilles Cohen, David Girondin-Moab and Muriel Trembleau, Christophe Rauck, Gabriel Dufay, Jean-Pierre Vincent, Volodia Serre, Juliette Navis and Raphaël Bouchard, and Jean-Paul Wenzel. He has been seen on film and in television under the direction of Francis Girod in Terminal, Marc Fitoussi in La Vie d'artiste, Martin Valente in Fragile, Elie Wajeman in Alyah and Les Anarchistes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs-Cannes 2012 and Semaine de la critique-Cannes 2015), Isabelle Czajka in La Vie domestique, Olivier de Plas in QI, Rodolphe Tissot in Ainsi soient-ils (seasons 2 and 3), and Vincent Garanq in L'Enquête.
Founded in 2009 by David Geselson, Compagnie Lieux-Dits is primarily concerned with the creation of contemporary works for theater. At the heart of its work is the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, as well as the tension between the power of politics to intimately affect individuals, who can then transform history in turn. In realizing its vision, the company relies on the powerful dynamic between a writer and a team of actors focused on forging new theatrical works that tackle current political, philosophical, and poetic issues.
Unwritten Lettersis supported by FACE Contemporary Theater, a program developed by FACE Foundation and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States with the support from the Florence Gould Foundation, Institut français-Paris, the French Ministry of Culture and private donors. Additional support for women artists has been provided by Fondation CHANEL.
Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street, New York
Tuesday, September 25, and Thursday, September 27-Saturday, September 29 at 8pm
A talkback with Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine will follow the performance on Sept. 25.
This collaborative multimedia installation performance from choreographer Will Rawls, poet Claudia Rankine, and filmmaker John Lucas responds to a question about the role of surveillance on citizens' physical and psychological lives. As Rankine told The New York Times, "One thing about being black in America-you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life. So you're always thinking, can I walk at night?...Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it's a gun? At what point can I just be?"Commissioned by Live Arts Bard (with support from A.R.T., the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and Crossing The Line Festival), What Remains premiered at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts in 2017. The performance integrates Rankine's poetry with Rawls's movement and Lucas's video projection in an immersive environment representing a haunted imagination, and responds to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus.What Remains was created in collaboration with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis, who perform in the piece, as well as David Szlasa (production design), Eleanor O'Connell (costume design), and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (sounds and music).
Will Rawls is a choreographer, writer, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice combines dance with other media to investigate the poetics of blackness, ambiguity, and abstraction. His inquiries into bodily states and humanity aim to redraw notions of power and form. Rawls has presented his work at The Chocolate Factory, MoMA PS1, Performa 15, the Whitney Museum of American Art, ImPulsTanz, and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. In addition to presenting his own performances, he collaborated with Ishmael Houston-Jones to co-curate the Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found. Focusing on the intergenerational impact of the AIDS epidemic on dancers, women, and people of color, he helped organize performances, reconstructions, discussions, and co-edited the catalogue, Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now. His writings have been published by Artforum, Triple Canopy, les presses du réel, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hammer Museum.
John Lucas was born and raised in Ohio. He is a documentary photographer and filmmaker working in the humanist tradition. Lucas has directed and produced several cutting-edge multimedia projects, including a collaborative series of video essays with poet Claudia Rankine titled Situations. In 2014 he completed his first feature length documentary film, The Cooler Bandits, which was awarded best documentary at the 2014 Harlem International Film Festival. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries, both nationally and internationally, including the Brooklyn Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, REDCAT (Los Angeles), OK Harris Works of Art (New York City), Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), La Panaderia (Mexico City), Aeroplastics Contemporary (Brussels), and Fieldgate Gallery (London).
What Remains was commissioned by Live Arts Bard, and is co-presented with Danspace Project.
LEILA BORDREUIL: EPISODES ET MUTATIONS (World Premiere)
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn
Wednesday, September 26 at 8pm
French-born Brooklyn-based composer, Leila Bordreuil explores the experience of perception while simultaneously warping it using hallucinatory and psycho-acoustic effects in her music. The bold Mivos Quartet premieres her new work, Episodes et Mutations, which is particularly concerned with perceptual distortion at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room. Inspired in part by Bordreuil's own cognitive experiences, she employs methods including extended bowing techniques, microtonal chords, and amplification to evoke her encounters with a neurological disorder. This engaging and transporting score will be accompanied by an empathetic light installation by Berlin-based artist Doron Sadja. A composer as well as visual artist, Sadja will create an immersive display informed by Alexander Scriabin's synesthetic associations among other color and sound theories.
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer working in the realm of improvisation, noise music, and sound art. She accesses concepts as diverse as jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Bordreuil challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and amplification methods. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic and frequently incorporate sound spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations. Bordreuil has collaborated with a diverse range of artists and current projects include a trio with Bill Nace and Tamio Shiraishi, a duo with sound artist Julia Santoli, an improvised string trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey, and a duo with techno producer Nick Dawson (Bookworms).
The Mivos Quartet, "one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles" (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet's beginnings in 2008 it has performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers representing multiple aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. Mivos is invested in commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet, striving to work closely with composers over extended periods of time. Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is also committed to working with guest artists, exploring multi-media projects involving live video and electronics, and performing improvised music. Doron Sadja is a Berlin based artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Often working with multi-channel spatialized sound, smoke machines, and high intensity lights, Sadja combines pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesizers, dense noise, and immersive light projections to create hyper-emotive sonic architecture. His output is diverse, spanning 25 speaker sound works to stroboscopic smoke and light shows, 360 degree projection pieces, and custom built motorized speaker systems that can precisely track sound around a room. Sadja founded Shinkoyo Records and the West Nile performance space in Brooklyn, and currently runs the Sound Portraits lecture/listening series in Berlin. Sadja studied Technology in Music and Related Arts at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and received his MFA in Sound Art from Bard College. Episodes et Mutations is co-presented with ISSUE Project Room.
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Place
Thursday, September 27 and Friday, September 28 at 7.30pm
In his most ambitious stage work to date, Boris Charmatz amasses a choreographic storm of movements assembled by more than 20 dancers each executing thousands of actions over an hour. Each gesture is unique, not to be repeated, and evaporates as soon as it is completed. Alluding to the ephemeral nature of dance, Charmatz's work-which is set to Mozart's Requiem, a glorious meditation on death-is a statement on the transient nature of being. The inspiration for 10000 gestures came to Charmatz while he was staging his piece, Levée des Conflits Extended, which is a study in permanence and immobility, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013. Charmatz set out to create the opposite effect in 10000 gestures, he told The New York Times: "I envision a choreographic forest in which no dancer ever repeats any of the gestures, each of which will be shown only once and will vanish as soon as it has been executed, like an ode to the impermanence of the art of dance."
French choreographer Boris Charmatz is widely celebrated for his radical approach to contemporary dance. From 2009 to 2017, Charmatz was the director of the Rennes & Brittany National Choreographic Centre, transforming it into the Museum of Dance (Musée de la danse). He has recently presented work to great acclaim at Sadler's Wells, Tate Modern, and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
10000 gestures is co-presented with NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts and supported by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program.
BRIDGING: AN INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE ON DIVERSITY AND
INCLUSION IN THE ARTS
Launched by FIAF and the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations during Crossing The Line 2016, BRIDGING explores issues of equity across cultures. Involving performances, a residency, and discussions, this year's program centers on the practice of dancer, choreographer, curator, and activist Syhem Belkhodja, who uses movement to empower youth and young adults, combat violence, and effect social change in Tunisia.
Artist, choreographer, director of four festivals (Tunis Capital of Dance, International Documentary Film Festival, Fashion & Design Carthage, Al-Kalimat) and two schools (the School of Arts and Cinema and the Mediterranean Centre for Contemporary Dance), Belkhodja is driven by the desire to promote the development of Tunisia in different artistic fields, linking artistic and educational objectives through teaching, creation, and advocacy.
AN EVENING WITH SYHEM BELKHODJAFIAF Le Skyroom
22 East 60th Street
Tuesday, October 2 at 7pm
This evening offers a deeper look into both the artistic, social, and educational work of artist and activist Syhem Belkhodja. Through the presentation of archival images, a moderated discussion with the artist, and a question and answer session, Belkhodja will illuminate her process as both a choreographer and the director of two pioneering schools.
NACERA BELAZA (NY Premiere)
Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street
Sur le Fil: Thursday, October 4 and Friday, October 5 at 8pm
Sur le Fil, La Nuit,and La Traversée : Saturday, October 6 at 8pm
Algerian-born dancer and choreographer Nacera Belaza presents three of her best known works. Sur le Fil, which will be staged three times-twice in stand-alone performances-encompasses all humanity, from a teenager's bedroom to death row. In this piece Belaza applies a rigorous set of rules to both the body and mind of three dancers, who achieve an ecstatic-like state on stage. In doing so they verge on the threshold of escape or transcendence for both performer and the viewer. On Saturday, October 6, Belaza offers a potent tryptich of Sur le Fil, alongside La Nuit, a solo danced by Belaza that delves into both the intimately personal and the infinitely universal, and La Traversée, in which the progression and memory of gestures and movements are passed along through ritual and inheritance.
Born in Algeria, Nacera Belaza has been living in France since the age of five. After her studies in modern literature at the Université de Reims, she created her own dance company in 1989. In 2008, she was honored with the Prix de la révélation chorégraphique de l'année du Syndicat de la critique for her work Le Cri. She was appointed Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in January 2015, and in 2017 she received the choreographer award from the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. In France, Belaza's company is regularly invited to major venues and festivals. Belaza founded an artistic cooperative in Algeria and has been in charge of the program at the contemporary dance festival "Le Temps dansé."
Nacera Belaza's performances are co-presented with Danspace Project.
BRIDGING SYMPOSIUMGibney
280 Broadway (Enter at 53A Chambers Street)
Sunday, October 7 at 2pm
This series of three dialogues featuring artists and cultural theorists explores the North African and African-American contexts with regard to youth, performance, and community. The symposium is curated by Omar Berrada.
- 2pm Artist Syhem Belkhodja joins Festival co-curator Simon Dove in conversation.
- 3pm Moroccan performer and choreographer Meryem Jazouli speaks with Paloma McGregor, a choreographer based in New York,on community and pedagogy.
- 4:30pm Performer Nacera Belaza and Columbia University comparative literature professor Brent Hayes Edwards discuss dance and diaspora.
- 6pm UC Berkeley anthropology professor, Stefania Pandolfo, presents a lecture on youth and subjectivity with a response by R. A. Judy, a cultural studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma'mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he curated public programs at the Centre Pompidou, was on the artistic steering committee of the Marrakech Biennale, and a co-director of Dubai's Global Art Forum. He recently edited The Africans, a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco, and curated exhibitions centering on the work and archive of writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani. Omar was the guest curator of the 2017 Abraaj Group Art Prize and the 2018 Forum 1:54 in Marrakech and New York, as well as a co-editor of Sharjah Biennial's web journal tamawuj.org. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.
METTE INGVARTSEN: 21 PORNOGRAPHIES (US Premiere)Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue, 4th floor
October 3-5 at 7pm
21 pornographies, Mette Ingvartsen's latest work in her "The Red Pieces" series-which explores the relationship between sexuality and the public sphere-focuses on how pornography operates in many areas of society. While the legalization of pornography in Ingvartsen's native Denmark in 1967 expanded erotic freedom with promises of greater gender equity, pornography today includes a wide range of expressions and uses, especially in the political realm where it can promote queer and feminist stances but also extremes of sexualized torture in war. 21 pornographies mixes physical action with narrative description, evoking pornographic acts outside their usual context: in expressions of cruelty, clinical precision, violence, and pain, but also moments of laughter, excitement, and thrill. As Springback Magazine stated, in 21 pornographies, Ingvartsen "takes an extraordinarily plural approach to the body. When she shifts deftly into the roles she's describing, now channeling a horny marquis, now a chocolate-covered starlet, the gravity of her transformation is arresting and often genuinely disturbing."
Mette Ingvartsenis a Danish choreographer and dancer to whom questions of kinesthesia, perception, affect, and sensation have been crucial. Starting with evaporated landscapes in 2009, a performance for foam, fog, light, and sound, Ingvartsen began a series of propositions that extended choreography into non-human materials. From 2009 to 2014, she focused on a series of works examining artificial nature. Later in 2014, she started a new cycle titled "The Red Pieces." This series opened with 69 positions, questioning the borders between private and public space by placing the naked body in the middle of the theater public. In the second piece, 7 Pleasures, a group of twelve performers confronted notions of nudity, body politics, and sexual practice. Ingvartsen, who holds a Ph.D. in choreography from UNIARTS/Lunds University in Sweden, is engaged in research, as in her performative conference Permeable Stage, which comes to Performance Space New York this fall. Ingvartsen also teaches and gives workshops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices.
21 pornographies is co-presented by Performance Space New York as part of the Posthuman Series.
TG STAN AND DOOD PAARD: ART (US Premiere)Text by Yasmina Reza
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
October 4-6 at 7:30pm
Members of theater collectives tg STAN and Dood Paard combine their practices to revisit Yasmina Reza's acclaimed Art-which, after its 1994 premiere in Paris, won the Molière awards for Best Playwright and Best Show in an Independent Theater; the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Tony Award for Best Play; and has been translated into 35 languages. In Art, a friendship between three men-Serge, Marc, and Yvan-is fractured when Serge splurges on an astronomically expensive all-white painting. As the canvas illuminates and exacerbates the ideological divergences and personality extremes in all three men, Serge and Marc become polarized while Yvan finds himself at an unsustainably tense center of their disagreement. tg STAN and Dood Paard's production expands the work into a play inside a play, with the actors embodying these discordant characters while simultaneously breaking from the script to continue this heated debate in a metaphysical space. Libération wrote of the performance, "What this production brings out is that the play is less about good or bad taste, but rather the systematic destruction of the object of another's love."
Flemish theater company STAN, an acronym for Stop Thinking About Names, is a collective formed by Jolente De Keersmaeker, Damiaan De Schrijver, and Frank Vercruyssen, who met in the late-1980s at the Antwerp Conservatorium. The company operates on the democratic principle that everyone participates in decisions on everything, from text selection, décor, and lighting to costumes and posters. Besides classics by Chekhov, Gorky, Schnitzler, Ibsen, Bernhard, and Pinter, STAN often presents work of contemporary playwrights such as Yasmina Reza, and is also known for working in a global context, often creating productions with international theatre makers such as Tiago Rodrigues. STAN nurtures a firm belief in the 'living' power of theater: the performance is not a reproduction of something that is learned, but is being created anew every night, along with the audience. A STAN performance is therefore not a finished product but rather an invitation to a dialogue.
Dood Paard was founded in 1993 when its core members, Kuno Bakker and Manja Topper, were about to graduate from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Arnhem (Netherlands). Integral to its philosophy is a commitment to operate as a collective with no single voice of authority. More than two decades later that idea continues to govern company decisions that are still made among its members, which include actors, directors, and technicians. The company regards the world from a critical stance, but one infected with good humor and an optimistic belief that man's intellect and creativity can transcend tragedy. Past and present works by Dood Paard include Reigen ad lib (Guggenheim Museum), Freetown by Rob de Graaf (La MaMa), Answer Me by Gerardjan Rijnders (La MaMa), Othello by William Shakespeare (La MaMa), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee. Dood Paard performs regularly in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as in theaters and festivals in Europe, the United States, and Canada.
This project has received funding through a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation and is supported by The General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA.
NORA CHIPAUMIRE: #PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA (World Premiere)
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
Thursday, October 11-Saturday, October 13, at 7pm
nora chipaumire returns to Crossing The Line-after having set the stage ablaze with "#PUNK" in 2017-with her three-part live performance album, #PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA. Inspired by the artist's formative years in Zimbabwe during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, each part of this triptych explores one of three musical ideologies. Punk, pop, and Congolese rumba are in turn confronted and celebrated through the music of artist Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and Congolese vocal performer and animator (atalaku), Rit Nzele, respectively. In "#PUNK," chipaumire enacts punk's rejection of the status quo, ethics, and ethos, embracing the possibility that there is no future, that the future is in the present. "100% POP," the second part of the performance, is an imagined utopia drawn from the memories of a formless girl being shaped as she discovers Grace Jones. The concluding set, "*N!GGA," is inspired by the inventive and joyful worlds of sapeurs, sebenes, atalaku, and rumba musicians in Africa, and it conjures up the depth and swagger of the iconoclastic Nzele. In each 40-minute set, chipaumire presents distinct sonic and visual landscapes and continues her career-long investigation of portraiture and self-portraiture, biography, subjecthood, liberation, and independence.
Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe and currently based in New York City, nora chipaumire has been challenging and embracing stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art, and aesthetics since she started making dances in 1998. She has studied dance in Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, and the U.S. and has performed internationally in France, Italy, Japan, Senegal, Zimbabwe, and many other countries. chipaumire is currently touring portrait of myself as my father (2016), an exploration of masculinity and black African manhood. She made her debut as film director in 2016 with the short film "Afro Promo #1 King Lady," commissioned by Dance for Film on Location at Montclair State University. Other recent work includes a digital book project, nhaka (2018).
#PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA is co-presented with The Kitchen and supported by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program.
JEANNE BALIBAR: LES HISTORIENNES (THE HISTORIANS) (World Premiere)
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
Saturday, October 13 at 7pm
Bringing attention to three female French historians and their writings, French actress Jeanne Balibar presents an evening inspired by the pioneering work of Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini, Charlotte de Castelnau, and Emmanuelle Loyer. Balibar, who studied history before devoting her career to acting, esteems these three thinkers as some of the most interesting of her generation. She will present an essay by each of these women, connecting their words with parallels in her own personal history to create an intimate and profound self-portrait of the actress. The performance will also shed light on the significant accomplishments of these historians and illuminate pertinent themes in their work such as feminism, autonomy, national identity, displacement, and class, Demartini, Castelnau, and Loyer will attend Balibar's performance of Les Historiennes, and will engage with the actress to discuss their work and provide further context to the performance.
French actress Jeanne Balibar has been lauded for her wide range of roles and her unique voice that has attracted the attentions of directors including Arnaud Desplechin, Bruno Podalydès, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Olivier Assayas, Jean-Claude Biette, Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Nicloux, Christophe Honore, Maïwenn, Diane Kurys, Benoît Jacquot, Raoul Ruiz, Jacques Rivette, Michael Winterbottom, Jean-Paul Civeyrac, Olivier Dahan, and lately Pawel Pawlikowski. She received the 2018 César Award for Best Actress for her performance in Mathieu Amalric's Barbara. She will direct her second feature film this summer.
In conjunction with Les Historiennes, FIAF's CinéSalon and Anthology Film Archives will co-present a retrospective of Jeanne Balibar's work as an actress, as well as the first film she directed, throughout September and October.
About Crossing The Line
"Adventurous programming that makes you think as much about your place in the world as about art itself" (The New York Times), Crossing The Line is an annual international arts festival for New York City produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with leading cultural institutions. 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 practice through the Crossing The Line Festival, presenting trailblazing 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 including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Artforum, and Frieze. Festival performances have earned multiple O
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