As part of the tenth edition of its celebrated contemporary arts festival Crossing the Line, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations are thrilled to launch BRIDGING: A French-American Dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts, a new initiative exploring issues of cultural equity in the US and France

French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and

the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

present

Artist Talks

BRIDGING: A French-American Dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts  Towards Cultural Equity: The Artist’s Perspective

Co-presented with Gibney Dance and Dancing in the Streets

Saturday, October 1 at 6pm • Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center •

280 Broadway, NYC

Towards Cultural Equity: The Institutional Perspective

Co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center

Saturday, October 15 at 5pm • Baryshnikov Arts Center • 450 West 37th Street, NYC

New York, NY, September 28, 2016—As part of the tenth edition of its celebrated contemporary arts festival Crossing the Line, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations are thrilled to launch BRIDGING: A French-American Dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts, a new initiative exploring issues of cultural equity in the US and France.

French Crossing the Line artists Anne Nguyen and Rachid Ouramdane and Firoz Ladak, CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations will join arts leaders in panel discussions preceding or following their performances. Speakers will offer perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic in conversations that re-evaluate policies and practices in an effort to move beyond simple acknowledgement of cultural diversity to achieve genuine equality in the arts in today’s shifting cultural landscape.

ARTIST TALKS

Towards Cultural Equity: The Artist’s Perspective

Saturday, October 1 at 6pm

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street)

Free with RSVP at [email protected]

What is the impact of cultural inequality on artists? Anne Nguyen and a panel of performance-makers from Paris and New York will reflect on their personal practice and experiences to offer proposals for addressing cultural inequality in their respective cities.

Panelists:
Mohamed El Khatib, writer and director, Paris
Anne Nguyen, dancer and choreographer, Paris
Ana Rokafella Garcia, dancer and choreographer, New York

David Thomson, dancer and choreographer, New York

Moderator:
George Emilio Sanchez, artist and educator

Co-presented with Gibney Dance and Dancing in the Streets
Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

Towards Cultural Equity: The Institutional Perspective
Saturday, October 15 at 5pm

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenue)

Free with RSVP at [email protected]

How can institutions best address cultural inequality? Rachid Ouramdane and Firoz Ladak join arts leaders from both sides of the Atlantic to share strategies for effecting change.

Keynote:
Patrick Weil, Yale professor, French historian, and political scientist

Panelists:
Firoz Ladak, CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation, Paris
Rachid Ouramdane, choreographer and Co-Director of National Choreographic Center, Grenoble
Zeyba Rahman, Senior Program Officer for the Building Bridges program at the Doris Duke Foundation, New York

Moderator:
Thomas Lax, Associate Curator at MoMA

Co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center

Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

BRIDGING PERFORMANCES:

ANNE NGUYEN

Breakdance world champion Anne Nguyen has spent the past decade bringing hip-hop—and some of the genre’s most accomplished dancers—to French stages and beyond. Her highly stylized work celebrates the technical excellence and idiosyncratic moves of each dancer as she works to create a new theatrical language from hip-hop forms. Her choreography throws abstracted urban dance into collision with geometry, architecture, and human experience.
Currently in residence at Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse in Paris, Nguyen is one of France’s most up-and-coming choreographers. This fall, Nguyen will make her US debut in a spectacular series of events that brings a new energy to the streets, and a new movement language to the stage.

“I seek to reconcile the freedom, pleasure, technical prowess, and self-transcendence peculiar to hip-hop… questioning the place of the human being in the modern-day world.”—Anne Nguyen

Autarcie (….): a search for self-sufficiency (US Premiere)

Co-presented with Dancing in the Streets and Gibney Dance

Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

Thursday, September 29 & Friday, September 30 at 8pm; Saturday, October 1 at 5pm & 8pm

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street)

Gibney Dance & FIAF Members $15; General Admission: $20

Four jumpsuit-clad female hip-hop dancers face off in a frantic, ritual warrior dance. Hypnotic beats underscore a game of strategy as each uses her specialty—break dance, popping, and waacking—in pursuit of territory, power, and possible points of harmony. The inner-workings of this restless tribe of fierce individuals unfold into an emotional narrative as the dancers work with and against each other, the space, and the audience.
Supported by Institut français, Howard Gilman Foundation, King’s Fountain, and FUSED: French-US Exchange in Dance, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE Foundation, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Recent Crossing the Line 2016 Performance:

Graphic Cyphers

Commissioned by Dancing in the Streets and Crossing the Line Festival

Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

Co-presented with The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Times Square Arts in partnership with Gibney Dance

Friday, September 23 and Sunday, September 25 at Roberto Clemente Plaza, South Bronx, NYC;

The Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Times Square

Free and open to the public

On Friday, September 23 and Sunday, September 25, Anne Nguyen joined forces with 20 NYC street dancers in a radical take on the hip-hop cypher. Playfully referencing the circle of dancers that surrounds an ever-changing soloist, the audience moves in and out of constellations of dancers who explore dizzying sequences of movement in ever-shifting levels and locations. For the audience, perspective, perception, and participation are in constant flux, with an intimate proximity to the action.

This world premiere morphed in three different locations, from Roberto Clemente Plaza in the South Bronx to the Bronx Museum of the Arts to, culminating in final performances in Times Square.

Supported by FUSED: French-US Exchange in Dance, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE Foundation with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication; King’s Fountain; the National Endowment for the Arts ‘Our Town’ Initiative; New York City Housing Authority.
 

RACHID OURAMDANE

For the past decade, Rachid Ouramdane has been at the forefront of European dance practice, defying and extending the definitions of performer and choreographer. After founding Compagnie L’A in 2007, he has continued his boundary-breaking path, blurring the line between dance and documentary. He is co-director of the National Choreographic Center of Grenoble and has collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, and Alain Buffard.

“All my works testify to a capacity in each of us to overcome difficulties, to fight against what imprisons us, to transform reality rather than suffer from it.”—Rachid Ouramdane

TORDRE (WROUGHT) (US Premiere)

Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.

Co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center and CCN2 – Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble.

Thursday, October 13, through Saturday, October 15 at 8pm

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenue)

$20

In TORDRE (WROUGHT), two of Ouramdane’s longtime collaborators—Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer—perform lonely solos in a haunting duet. Intensely physical performances of hypnotic, whirling gestures foreground the specificity of each woman’s body as she paints a raw, captivating self-portrait. Compelling in its repetition, Ouramdane’s choreography pushes the performers to find the gesture that makes them who they are.

BRIDGING PANELISTS:

Towards Cultural Equity: The Artist’s Perspective

About Mohamed El Khatib

Mohamed El Khatib is an author, director, and performer based in France. His work has been showcased with great success at major performing arts events including the Avignon Festival. He attempts to confront drama with other media, such as films, installations, and newspapers, and to observe the friction they produce. After studying literature, spending time at the Dramatic Art Center of Mexico (CADAC), and earning a PhD in sociology on “critique in the French press,” in 2008 he co-founded the Zirlib collective on a simple premise: aesthetics aren’t devoid of political meaning. He began with Nowhere to Hide, a reflection on the notion of grief, a project that will span the next 15 years. Since 2011, Mohamed El Khatib has been supported by the L’L in Brussels, a research space where he has been developing research around intimate writing and is attempting to explore, to the point of exhaustion, different modes of anti-spectacular exposition. In 2014–2015, he was an associate artist at the Centre Dramatique National Orléans/Loiret/Centre.

About Anne Nguyen

Anne Nguyen founded the par Terre Dance Company in 2005. As a breakdance world champion, she is familiar with the world of hip-hop battles, and aims to tap into the technical excellence peculiar to each hip-hop dance specialty. Based on the combination of a technical, high-performance dance form with highly graphic, pure, de-structured choreographic compositions, Anne’s productions convey a feeling of abstraction and challenge the place of the human being in the contemporary world. Anne Nguyen also writes poetry, short prose items, and articles on dance in Danser magazine, Repères, and cahier de danse. Excerpts from her collection of poems, the Manual of the City Warrior, have been published in Graff It! magazine, where she served as chief editor of the dance section. Several pieces performed by the par Terre Dance Company , including Square Root and Spirit of the Underground, incorporate Anne Nguyen’s texts, recorded or spoken. Anne teaches hip-hop dance using a method based on postures, on the deconstruction of dance moves, and on their subsequent deployment within the performance space. Since 2012, she has taught a technical and theoretical workshop on hip-hop dance at the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, called Hip-hop, a contemporary culture. Anne Nguyen was awarded the 2013 SACD Nouveau Talent Choréographie prize and appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2015.

About Ana ‘Rokafella’ Garcia

Hip-hop dancer/choreographer Ana ‘Rokafella’ Garcia began street performing with crews such as The Transformers, The Breeze Team, and the New York City Float Committee. In 1994 she was invited to join GhettOriginal, a hip-hop dance company where she became further exposed to the “old school” dance technique. She has taught workshops at NYU and Howard University as well as neighborhood high schools and community centers, the New School, and Connecticut College. The nonprofit company she co-founded with Kwikstep, Full Circle Prod, serves the community with educational and multimedia urban-themed performances. They presented their hip-hop theater directorial debut, Soular Power’d, on Broadway at the New Victory Theater to rave reviews. She also directed All the Ladies Say, a documentary based on the challenging lifestyles of female break dancers, featuring B-girls from all over the world.

About George Emilio Sanchez

George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist, and educator. He has received two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Performance Art/Emergent Forms, a Rockefeller MAP Grant,and is a Fulbright Scholar. As well as serving as chairperson at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island Performing and Creative Arts Department, he also is the Performance Director of the Hemispheric Institute’s Emergenyc performance project that aims to explore the intersection of arts and activism. He has worked as an arts-in-education consultant with the Bronx Museum of the Arts for over a decade. His most recent solo work, Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside The Box, was be presented by El Museo del Barrio in the summer of 2015. In addition, he travels nationally and internationally to present workshops on Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed techniques.

About David Thomson

David Thomson has worked as a collaborative artist in the fields of music, dance, theater, and performance with a wide range of artists including Trisha Brown, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, and Ralph Lemon, among many others. His own work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC, The Invisible Dog, and Mt Tremper Arts. Thomson is a Bessie award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement and has received fellowships from USArtist |Ford, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo.  He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

Towards Cultural Equity: The Institutional Perspective

About Patrick Weil

Professor Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil’s work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and legal status of religion. In France, Professor Weil participated in a 2003 Presidential Commission on secularism, established by Jacques Chirac. Among his recent publications are Citizenship, Passports, and the Legal Identity of Americans: Edward Snowden and Others Have a Case in the Courts, 123 Yale Law Journal Forum, 565 (2014);  Headscarf versus Burqa: Two French Bans with Different Meanings, in Constitutional Secularism in an Age of Religious Revival, Susanna Mancini and Michel Rosenfeld ed., Oxford University Press,  2014, 196-215. His most recent book, written in the aftermaths of Charlie Hebdo killings is Le sens de la République: What direction for the French Republic, (with Nicolas Truong, Grasset, 2015).

About Firoz Ladak

Since 2005, Firoz Ladak is the CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations. Firoz is responsible for the strategy, implementation, and financial management of a philanthropic network that spans Europe, the United States, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Across all regions, the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations work to create social empowerment and a more collaborative society, supporting projects and programs in education, the arts, health, and entrepreneurship. Firoz is leading the Foundations’ transition from traditional giving to strategic philanthropy through an innovative mix of impact-driven programs and best practice sharing. Firoz is also a member of the board of various foundations under the Edmond de Rothschild umbrella, including the Fondation Ophtalmologique Adolphe de Rothschild, a Paris-based teaching hospital specializing in ophthalmology and neurology.

About Rachid Ouramdane

Rachid Ouramdane has been creating art projects since 1995. He is an Associate Artist at the Theâtre de la ville in Paris and at the Bonlieu Theater in Annecy, France. He is regularly invited to work on many collaborations: with the Lyon Opera Ballet (Superstars, 2006; All around, 2014); for the dancers of the Russian company Migrazia during a residence in Siberia for the Intradance project (Russia) (Borscheviks… a true story…, 2010); and for the 20th birthday of Candoco Dance Company (UK) with disabled dancers (Looking back, 2011). Since Rachid Ouramdane founded L’A. dance company, his work has been based on a meticulous collection of evidence, in collaboration with filmmakers or authors. So he employs the art of dance to contribute to social debates through choreographic pieces that develop a poetics of testimony. In his recent work, he has explored the principles of writing for a big group of dancers. Alongside his creative projects, Ouramdane is working to enhance learning and exchange through the management of international workshops for artistic research in France, Romania, Netherlands, Brazil, and the United States.

About Zeyba Rahman

Zeyba Rahman is Senior Program Officer for the Building Bridges Program, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. Rahman joined the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, an extension of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in 2013 as senior program officer for the Building Bridges Program. Rahman manages the Program’s national grant making to support projects that advance relationships, increase understanding, and reduce bias between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Before joining the foundation, Rahman led internationally and nationally recognized projects as a creative director/producer to promote understanding between diverse communities. The roles she has performed  include: director, Asia and North America, Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco; artistic director, Arts Midwest’s Caravanserai: A Place Where Cultures Meet; curator, BAM’s Mic Check Hip Hop; creative consultant, Public Programs, Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia Galleries; chief curator, French Institute Alliance Francaise (FIAF)’s World Nomads Morocco Festival; project director, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation/National Endowment for the Arts’ Global Cultural Connections; and senior advisor, Muslim Voices Festival. She is an advisor to Artworks for Freedom and serves on the nominating committee of the Civitella Foundation in Italy. Twice honored by New York City’s government, Rahman is the subject of two television profiles as a global arts leader.

About Thomas Lax

Thomas J. Lax was appointed Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014. For the previous seven years, he worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he organized over a dozen exhibitions as well as numerous screenings, performances, and public programs. Thomas is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts; on the Advisory Committee Vera List Center for Arts and Politics; on the Arts Advisory Committee of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; a member of the Catalyst Circle at The Laundromat Project; and on the Advisory Board of Recess. Thomas received his BA from Brown University in Africana Studies and Art/Semiotics, and an MA in Modern Art from Columbia University. In 2015, Thomas was awarded the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

About The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

The mission of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations is to promote social empowerment and a collaborative society. It is rooted in a century-long tradition of giving founded on humanism, inclusion and the search for excellence. The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations continue to apply the same principles in the transformation of their philanthropic legacy by identifying innovative solutions and creative partnerships in education, the arts, health and entrepreneurship. www.edrfoundations.org

About Baryshnikov Arts Center

Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) is the realization of a long-held vision by artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov who sought to build an arts center in Manhattan that would serve as a gathering place for artists from all disciplines. BAC’s opening in 2005 heralded the launch of this mission, establishing a thriving creative laboratory and performance space for artists from around the world. BAC’s activities encompass a robust residency program augmented by a range of professional services, including commissions of new work, as well as the presentation of performances by artists at varying stages of their careers. In tandem with its commitment to supporting artists, BAC is dedicated to building audiences for the arts by presenting contemporary, innovative work at affordable ticket prices. www.bacnyc.org.

About Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets, based in the South Bronx, develops movement-based projects through long term initiatives, integrating rigorous inquiry, artistic exploration, deep community engagement, and the nurturing of urban artists. The three core programs: Artist Residencies; based in communities, to nurture individual creativity, and build bridges across generations, communities, and cultures, The Incubator; supporting and developing new generations of artists in dance and social practice, and Urban Dance Development; nurturing emerging urban dance artists, and advocating the value, and importance of Hip Hop culture in NYC, nationally and internationally.

About Gibney Dance

Gibney Dance, founded in 1991, is a trailblazing organization whose mission is to bring the possibility of movement where it otherwise would not exist. Through three interrelated fields of action—Center, Company, and Community Action—Gibney Dance is “Making Space for Dance” in studios, on stages, and in underserved shelters and schools. www.gibneydance.org

About Crossing the Line 2016

Crossing the Line, now in its tenth year, is an annual citywide festival that engages international artists and New York City audiences in discovery and dialogue to re-imagine the world around us. The festival is produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with leading cultural institutions. This year’s edition of the festival takes place from September 22–November 3, 2016.

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 tradition through the Crossing the Line Festival, presenting leading-edge 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. The festival has been voted “Best of 2009,” “Best of 2010,” “Best of 2012,” “Best of 2013,” and “Best of 2014” by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York, Artforum, and Frieze, with performances earning an Obie and several Bessie awards. The New York Times states, “For terrifically unusual, unpredictable, unnameable performance, we’ve come to expect a lot from … the curators of the French Institute Alliance Française’s interdisciplinary festival,” and The New Yorker says, “This interdisciplinary festival…goes from strength to strength.” www.crossingtheline.org

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. fiaf.org

Merci!

Special thanks to the series co-presenters Gibney Dance, Dancing in the Streets, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Crossing the Line 2016 is made possible with generous leadership support from Air France and Delta Air Lines, the official airlines of FIAF; Florence Gould Foundation; The Hermès Foundation (Fondation d’entreprise Hermès) in the framework of the New Settings program; JCDecaux; and the National Endowment for the Arts; and with generous major support from Cultural Services of the French Embassy; FACE; Howard Gilman Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; NYSCA; and Pommery.

BRIDGING: A French-American Dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts is made possible with generous leadership support from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.

Our Producer’s Circle: Sarah Arison, Florence Dupont, Ron Guttman, Isabelle Kowal, Elizabeth Krief Manardo, Marie Nugent-Head, and Elisabeth Wilmers.

FIAF would like to thank the following for their generous support of Crossing the Line 2016:

British Council; Enoch Foundation; Institut français; Italian Cultural Institute New York; King’s Fountain; NYC Housing Authority; Omaha Foundation; Robert de Rothschild; and SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques).

LISTING SUMMARY

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