2025 Crossing the Line Festival
Company:
L’Alliance New York
From September 9 through November 22, L’Alliance New York will present an international survey of new experiments in audience and form, highlighting a diversity of artists working at the intersections of visual art, music, film, dance, and theater. Festival offerings include a film and live music collaboration between cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton and her late partner, the auteur Chantal Akerman; an all-ages exhibition workshop by Clédat & Petitpierre; theater work by Marion Siéfert, Rimini Protokoll, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Carolina Bianchi, and Tiago Rodrigues; and dance by Noé Soulier, Kimberly Bartosik, Ruth Childs, Yoshi Oïda & Kaori Ito, Soa Ratsifandrihana, Compagnie Dyptik, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Amala Dianor, and Will Rawls. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit https://lallianceny.org/crossing-the-line-festival/.
“Bigger, bolder, and more boisterous than ever, the 18th Crossing The Line festival promises to be our most exciting edition yet. For three months the festival will travel across New York City for electric performances featuring artists from around the world. With film, music, dance, theater, installation, and performance, the lineup features numerous North American premieres, new voices and returning favorites. In addition to our commitment to works from the French-speaking world that celebrate diversity, inclusion and hope, we are proud to support US-based artists representing the urgency of dialogue in this country and across oceans,” said Violaine Huisman, Artistic Director.
D’Est en musique
Chantal Akerman, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Sarah Rothenberg
Sept. 9, 7:30pm | New York Premiere | L’Alliance New York Florence Gould Theater
Presented in collaboration with MoMA
Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman envisioned this live, musical take on her 1993 travelogue D’Est in 2005 with her partner, the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. Now, in this New York Premiere, Wieder-Atherton performs her curated score —featuring works by Bartók, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel—alongside award-winning pianist, Sarah Rothenberg.
Les tutomouves
Clédat & Petitpierre
Sept. 13 through Dec. 19 | North American Premiere | L’Alliance New York First Floor Gallery
As a lighter version of the monumental installation Les plantamouves originally created for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, this exhibition-workshop combines the tactile whimsy of mobile sculpture with interactive dance, inviting audiences of all ages to engage with more than 240 vibrantly colorful foam pieces through inventive video tutorials.
The Big Sleep (Le Grand Sommeil)
Marion Siéfert
Sept 17, 7:30pm | New York Premiere | L’Alliance New York Skyroom
Back at L’Alliance New York after her acclaimed Crossing The Line 2022 debut, _jeanne_dark_, Marion Siéfert brings another ferocious collaboration with actress Helena de Laurens that embodies the tortures and triumphs of teenage girlhood.
Movement on movement
Noé Soulier
Sept 24 & Sept 25, 7:30pm | New York Premiere | L’Alliance New York Skyroom
One of the rising stars of French contemporary dance, Noé Soulier crafts a lecture-performance based on William Forsythe's Improvisation Technologies—a series of educational demonstrations in which Forsythe draws shapes with different parts of his body.
All right. Good night.
Rimini Protokoll
Sept 25 – Sept. 27, 7:30pm | North American Premiere | NYU Skirball
Presented in partnership with NYU Skirball Center for The Performing Arts
In All right. Good night., acclaimed director Helgard Haug weaves together the disappearance of Flight MH370 and her father's decline into dementia. With a live score by Barbara Morgenstern and the Zafraan Ensemble, the piece evokes the emotional weight of absence. It asks what remains when someone—or something—is no longer there.
bLUr
Kimberly Bartosik
Oct. 2 – 4, 7:30pm | World Premiere | New York Live Arts
Co-Presented with New York Live Arts
Built in haunting cycles of physical and emotional extremes, bLUr exists within a corporeal landscape of crisis. Five performers navigate urgent interventions, tender and brutal rescues, moving through a space of howling hunger and deeply erotic tenderness with exquisite humanity.
delicate people
Ruth Childs & Cécile Bouffard
Oct 4 (Rain date: Oct 5), 12:45pm & 2:45pm | North American Premiere | Governors Island
Co-Presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival and Governors Island Arts’ INTERVENTIONS performance series.
Dancer Ruth Childs and sculptor Cécile Bouffard initiated their delicate people collaboration in 2021. In this latest series of vignettes, the artists address figures and motifs of disturbing identities and fine-tuned movements.
Blast!
Ruth Childs
Oct 8 – Oct 10, 7pm | North American Premiere | The Chocolate Factory Theater
Co-presented with the Chocolate Factory Theater
Creating a choreographic circle in dialogue with percussive sound design by Stéphane Vecchione, Blast! is a study of how human bodies express themselves.
Fragmented Shadows
Wanjiru Kamuyu
Oct 15 – Oct 17, 2025, 7:30pm | U.S. Premiere | New York Live Arts
Co-presented with New York Live Arts
How can we use the body as a site of liberation, a site of healing? Grounded in epigenetic and psychosomatic research, Wanjiru Kamuyu offers voice and light to embodied legacies of inherited and personal suffering.
BAM in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival Presents
LACRIMA
Caroline Guiela Nguyen
Oct 22, Oct 24, Oct 25 at 7:30pm and Oct 26, 3pm | U.S. Premiere | BAM Strong Harvey Theater
A Parisian house of haute couture receives an extraordinary commission. Over a period of several months and under the oath of utmost secrecy, more than thirty women and men will be hard at work in a Parisian workshop, making lace in Alençon and sewing embroideries in Mumbai.
CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY, Chapter I:
The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella
Carolina Bianchi Y Cara de Cavalo
Oct 23 – 25 at 7:30pm | U.S. Premiere | Powerhouse Arts
Co-presented with Powerhouse: International
Blending theater and performance art, Brazilian director and writer Carolina Bianchi stages a shocking and vulnerable exploration of art and narratives of sexual violence that haunt women across history.
Le Tambour de Soie (The Silk Drum)
Yoshi Oïda, Kaori Ito, Paul Lazar, Makoto Yabuki
Oct 24 & Oct 25, 8pm | North American Premiere | Japan Society
Presented by Japan Society in partnership with Crossing The Line Festival
Stripping a beloved Noh play down to its core, this Festival d’Avignon hit tells the human drama between an old man desperate to feel young again and the beautiful dancer made complicit in his downfall.
Le Grand Bal
Compagnie Dyptik
Oct 28 – Nov 1, 7:30pm and Nov 1 at 2pm | North American Premiere | The Joyce Theater
The Joyce’s presentation of Dyptik is in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival.
Acclaimed across Europe, Compagnie Dyptik makes its North American Premiere with this singularly hypnotic work that blends modern and hip-hop dance styles into a frenetic dance fever.
Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna
Soa Ratsifandrihana
Oct 28–30 at 7:30pm | U.S. Premiere | Powerhouse Arts
Co-presented with Powerhouse: International
Brussels-based choreographer Soa Ratsifandrihana draws upon her Madagascan origin and diasporic experience to tell the story she longed to hear as a child. The ever-evolving performance, woven together with dance, music, and storytelling, reflects the performers’ entangled histories—rooted in Madagascar, Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, and shaped by life in France and Belgium, where they all live today.
By Heart
Tiago Rodrigues
Nov 3 & Nov 4, 7:30pm | L’Alliance New York Florence Gould Theater
Presented in association with BAM
Ten audience members come together onstage for an act of collective memorization, learning Shakespearean sonnet by heart under the direction of acclaimed international theater artist Tiago Rodrigues. The results, according to a New York Times Critic’s Pick review, are “miraculous.”
Coquilles
Amala Dianor
Nov 15, 11:30am & 3pm | North American Premiere | L’Alliance New York Skyroom
Created for audiences as young as one year old, this rousing piece for two dancers crafts a graceful, accessible story of contrasting physicality, shared language, and connection across difference.
[siccer]
Will Rawls
Nov 20 – Nov 22, 7:30pm | New York Premiere | Performance Space New York
Co-Presented with Performance Space New York
Driven by the usage of “[sic],” a Latin adverb which indicates incorrect spelling within a quotation, often employed to contrast Black vernacular with standard English, Will Rawls’ [siccer] considers the ways in which Black bodies are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in the media.
Support for Crossing The Line Festival
Howard Gilman Foundation, Air France, and The Wescustogo Foundation. L'Alliance New York's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the Support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Additional Support for Crossing The Line Festival
Opening Reception supported by Pommery
Movement on movement is presented with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
delicate people is supported by Federal Office of Culture (Switzerland)
Blast! is supported by Federal Office of Culture (Switzerland)
By Heart is supported by Theatre & New Forms, a program of Villa Albertine and the Albertine Foundation.
Cinema at L’Alliance New York is made possible by the generous support of BNP Paribas and Air France.
