September 6–October 15, 2017
The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York’s premiere French cultural center, is thrilled to announce the full program for the 2017 Crossing the Line Festival. Now in its eleventh year, the path-breaking fall arts festival will fill prestigious performance venues, museums, public spaces, and other surprising locations across New York City with vital, imaginative new works by artists of vastly diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and practices.
Select festival events include:
Ryoji Ikeda: supercodex [live set] (New York premiere)
Co-presented with The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Wednesday, September 6 and Thursday, September 7 at 7pm
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue
Renowned visual artist and electronic music composer Ryoji Ikeda opens Crossing the Line 2017 with his most recent audiovisual concert. Ikeda stands alone on stage surrounded by mammoth projections of mesmerizing black and white digital imagery. Using raw data and mathematical models, he masterfully mines information for rhythmic beats. The result is a beeping, pulsating, immersive mix of sound and multimedia art that dazzles the senses.
Artist Focus: Faustin Linyekula
Part of BRIDGING: an initiative co-developed and supported by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations
Various events throughout September
Banataba [new work] (world premiere)
Co-presented with the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Saturday, September 9 at 2pm & 7pm, Sunday, September 10 at 12pm & 3:30pm
Gallery 534, Vélez Blanco Patio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue
Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako: In Search of Dinozord (US premiere)
Co-presented with NYU Skirball
Friday September 22 and Saturday, September 23 at 7:30pm
Post-performance conversation on September 22 with Faustin Linyekula and NYU Faculty
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place
Festival of Dreams (world premiere)
Co-commissioned and co-presented with Dancing in the Streets and 651 ARTS, in partnership with BRIC, University Settlement, and the Soul of Brooklyn Festival
Saturday, September 23 at 3pm
Roberto Clemente Plaza, The Hub, 149th Street and Third Avenue, South Bronx
Sunday, September 24 at 3pm
Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Brooklyn
Free and open to the public
Faustin Linyekula has been described as “quite possibly the most important artist working on the African continent today” (Frieze). Based in Kisangani, DR Congo, his riveting work often addresses themes of memory, forgetting, and dreams. With his country's history as a catalyst, he considers the impact that decades of war, trauma, and economic uncertainty have on people's lives. Crossing the Line 2017 will feature a focus on Faustin Linyekula, presenting three works that reflect the scope of his mission, from a collaborative community project to compelling dance theater.
Alain Willaume: VULNERABLE
Curated by François Hébel
September 15–October 28
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th Street (between Park & Madison Avenue)
Hours: Monday–Friday 11am–6pm, Saturday 11am–5pm
Opening: Thursday, September 14 from 6–8pm
Free and open to the public
Alain Willaume’s unusual photos evoke a ghostly undercurrent in our everyday lives. In depicting the likes of lone and meditative figures in barren landscapes and dusty roads, he highlights the fractures in the places we call home. Working outside of the mainstream and the traditions of documentary photography, Willaume creates an arresting personal cartography of engaged metaphors and enigmatic imagery. His haunting body of work evokes the lurking violence and vulnerability in the world as well as the human beings who inhabit it.
Annie Dorsen: The Great Outdoors (US premiere; a 2017 Crossing the Line Festival Commission)
Thursday, September 21 and Friday, September 22 at 7:30pm; Saturday September 23 at 7:30 & 10pm
FIAF, Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street
Since 2009, American writer and director Annie Dorsen has used algorithms in performances to question how we live with and make meaning from technology. With The Great Outdoors, she takes us on a sublime journey through inner space in the darkness of a planetarium. A lone performer reads texts culled from internet comments and fed through an algorithm, giving voice and body to the thoughts of countless individuals all tapping away at their keyboards in isolation.
Alessandro Sciarroni: UNTITLED_I will be there when you die (New York premiere)
Co-presented with La MaMa
Supported by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program
Thursday, September 28, Friday, September 29, and Saturday, September 30 at 8pm
La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street (between Second Avenue and The Bowery)
Alessandro Sciarroni creates visceral, visual, high-endurance work, somewhere between dance, performance art, and ritual. Taking simple, repetitive choreography to its extremes, he pushes dancers to their physical limits to uncover obsession, fear, and vulnerability.
In this contemplative work on the passage of time, four jugglers start nonchalantly tossing pins, building to a thrilling spectacle while Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld DJs live. This new performance embodies the drama and artistry of the juggler’s struggle—against gravity, against their weary bodies, against the potential for failure in every toss.
Bouchra Ouizguen: Corbeaux (Crows) (NYC premiere)
Presented in partnership with Brooklyn Museum, Abrons Arts Center, and Movement Research
Supported by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program
Saturday, September 30 at 12 & 4pm; Sunday, October 1 at 3pm
Brooklyn Museum, Beaux-Arts Court, 200 Eastern Parkway, between Mary Pinkett and Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn
Free with museum admission
Corbeaux (Crows) from Moroccan dancer and choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen is a hypnotic, site-specific living sculpture that interrupts and transforms public spaces. Dark silhouettes of women emerge from the shadows and silently fan out across the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court. Moroccan performers are joined by a local cast of New Yorkers for this frenzied, full-body performance. Forming alchemical arrangements, they move again and again, erupting into an immersive chorus of piercing sounds and rhythmic cries, making all notions of time and space disappear.
Sophie Calle: Voir la mer (New York premiere)
Presented in partnership with Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts
October 1–31, nightly from 11:57pm-midnight.
On Times Square electronic billboards, 42-49th Streets between 7th Avenue and Broadway
Free and open to the public
Since the late 1970’s, Sophie Calle—“France’s foremost conceptual artist” (The New York Times)—has been making provocative and often controversial work that confronts issues in her personal life. She is well-known for her sleuth-like explorations of human relationships, which have led her to follow strangers, and find work as a hotel chambermaid.
In Istanbul, a city surrounded by the sea, Sophie Calle met people who had never seen it and brought them to the shores of the Black Sea. Magnified on Times Square’s electronic billboards, five intimate video portraits silently reveal their emotional response to this evocative experience.
For the full schedule of events, visit us at www.crossingtheline.org.
