The Essex Street Market on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; Christ Church in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn; and the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City are among the venues to be used for a festival of interdisciplinary works and performances by artists from around the world this fall.
This sixth annual edition of the program, called “Crossing the Line,” is presented by the French Institute Alliance Française, a New York French cultural center.
The festival opens on Sept. 14 in the Institute’s newly renovated Florence Gould Hall with a concert by Bill Frisell, a guitarist and composer, uniting his 858 Quartet and Beautiful Dreamers trio.
Other participants include Bel Borba, a Brazilian visual artist who will create a new work each day of the festival in different locations around New York City, using only found and recycled materials.
This year Gideon Lester, the director of theater programs at Bard College, joins Lili Chopra, FIAF’s artistic director, and Simon Dove, the director of the Herberger Institute School of Dance at Arizona State University, as co-curator of the festival.
Also on the lineup, David Levine, a theater director, will present “Habit,” a 90-minute drama performed in a continuous eight-hour loop that combines conventional theater, reality TV and visual arts. And Brian Rogers, the co-founder of The Chocolate Factory, will premiere “Hot Box,” which is described as “a live performance (and endurance challenge) that draws inspiration from extreme movies such as Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo.’”
And Faustin Linyekula, a Congolese director and choreographer, will conduct a conversation with the stage director Peter Sellars on the power of the arts as an agent for change as well as present a new solo work, “Le Cargo.”
The festival is to run through October 14 and tickets go on sale August 1.
