As part of the 2016 edition of Crossing the Line, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s celebrated arts festival, FIAF is thrilled to join partners The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, and The Museum of Modern Art to present a special focus on French choreographer Jérôme Bel

Jérôme Bel

Véronique Doisneau

Monday, October 17 at 7:30pm • FIAF, Florence Gould Hall

The show must go on

Co-presented with The Joyce Theater

Thursday, October 20 through Saturday, October 22 • The Joyce Theater

US Premiere

Jérôme Bel

Co-presented with The Kitchen

Thursday, October 27 through Saturday, October 29 • The Kitchen

World Premiere

Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company

Presented by The Museum of Modern Art

Thursday, October 27 through Monday, October 31 • Museum of Modern Art, Marron Atrium

New York, New York, October 14, 2016—As part of the 2016 edition of Crossing the Line, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s celebrated arts festival, FIAF is thrilled to join partners The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, and The Museum of Modern Art to present a special focus on French choreographer Jérôme Bel.

Following the lauded performance of his work Cédric Andrieux at Crossing the Line in 2010, Bel returns for the 10th edition of the festival with presentations of major performances The show must go on (2001) at The Joyce Theater; the US premiere of Jérôme Bel (1995) at The Kitchen; and the world premiere of his new work Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company, at The Museum of Modern Art. The series of events will begin at FIAF with a screening of Bel’s film Véronique Doisneau (2004), followed by a conversation between the artist and Associate Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, Ana Janevski. These touchstone works in Bel’s oeuvre provide an overview of his practice from the 1990s until today.

Jérôme Bel explores the relationship between choreography and popular culture, and dancer and audience, often using humor as a way to break the formality of a theatre apparatus. Part of a generation of choreographers who rose to prominence in the mid-1990s, Bel’s work has often been referred to as conceptual. He questions both art and contemporary dance by deconstructing modes of presentation and the notion of authorship while problematizing the historical prominence of technical virtuosity in dance.

“There is no doubt that I am right on the fringes of the choreographic field—and I would say field, not dance—but my task is to see where I can enlarge that terrain while remaining within it.”—Jérôme Bel

Véronique Doisneau

Monday, October 17 at 7:30pm

FIAF, Florence Gould Hall, 55 E 59th Street (between Park & Madison Avenue)
Free with RSVP at www.crossingtheline.org

Véronique Doisneau—a career-long member of Paris Opera’s corps de ballet—takes the spotlight on the eve of her retirement. Alone on a starkly empty stage, tutu in hand, Doisneau speaks to the audience in an intimate address. Mournful and celebratory, she reflects on her life as a ballerina, and performs her supporting roles in well-known ballets as she hums along from memory. Recorded on the night of Doisneau’s final performance, the film gives you front row access to this greatly admired piece from Bel’s series of biographical works about the lives of dancers.

Following the screening, Jérôme Bel will be present for a conversation and Q&A about his work and career with Associate Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, Ana Janevski.

The show must go on

Co-presented with The Joyce Theater

Thursday, October 20 & Friday October 21 at 8pm, Saturday, October 22 at 2pm & 8pm

The Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Street)

Tickets from $30

A landmark of contemporary performance, the Bessie-award-winning The show must go on is dance at its most mischievous. A DJ plays chart-topping pop songs to a group of twenty dancers—trained and untrained—who sing, stand, and dance along. With perfect comic timing, Bel’s pared down choreography delivers surprises while it both celebrates the experience of theater and questions the mechanisms of performance.

Curtain Chat with Jérôme Bel will follow the 2pm performance on Sat, Oct 22.

Support for The Joyce’s presentation of international dance provided by the R. Britton Fisher and Family Gift for International Dance.

US PREMIERE

Jérôme Bel

Co-presented with The Kitchen

Thursday, October 27, through Saturday, October 29 at 8pm

The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenue)

$20

Jérôme Bel’s signature self-titled work premiered in 1995. Radical in its simplicity, this work sparked hot debate about what constitutes dance. Finally making its New York premiere as part of Crossing the Line, Jérôme Bel is considered today an iconic work of contemporary performance. Stripping dance down to its essential elements—a male and female body, a light bulb and iconic music—he radically questions what performance is made of, and what it can reveal.

WORLD PREMIERE
Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company 

Presented by The Museum of Modern Art

Thursday, October 27 through Monday, October 31, 12:30 & 3pm daily

Museum of Modern Art, Marron Atrium, 11 West 53rd Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenue)

Free with museum admission

The Museum of Modern Art will premiere a new work by Bel as part of MoMA’s longstanding Artist’s Choice series, with Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company (2016). When invited to be the first choreographer to participate in an Artist’s Choice, Jérôme Bel quickly shifted his focus from the artworks in the collection to MoMA’s staff, to the care and labor necessary to maintain the collection. Created specifically for the Museum’s Marron Atrium, MoMA Dance Company brings together 20 to 25 MoMA staff members from different departments and is based on the principles of solo and group performances. By featuring amateur dancers, the project subverts the traditional notion of a dance company’s technical virtuosity, as well as the Museum’s exhibition series’ habitual focus on objects.

Jérôme Bel programs are presented on the occasion of the Crossing the Line Festival 2016 by FIAF, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, and The Museum of Modern Art. Supported by Institut français and Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.
About Jérôme Bel

Born in 1964, Jérôme Bel lives in Paris and works worldwide. Bel studied at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine of Angers (France) from 1984 to 1985. From 1985 to 1991, he danced for a number of choreographers in both France and Italy. In 1992, he worked as an assistant to the director and choreographer Philippe Découflé for the ceremonies of the XVI Winter Olympic Games of Albertville and Savoie (France).

His first piece, a choreography of objects, is entitled nom donné par l’auteur (1994). The second, Jérôme Bel (1995), is based on the identity and total nudity of the four performers. His third piece, Shirtology (1997), was commissioned by the Centro Cultural de Belem (Lisbon) and Victoria (Ghent). In 2000, a Japanese version of the piece was produced in Kyoto and Tokyo. Shirtology presents an actor wearing multiple shop-bought T-shirts. His next piece, The last performance (1998), quotes several times over a solo by the German choreographer Susanne Linke, as well as Hamlet or André Agassi, in an attempt to define an ontology of the performance. In 1999, Bel asked Myriam Gourfink to choreograph a solo for him, Glossolalie (1999). The piece Xavier Le Roy (2000) was claimed by Jérôme Bel as his own, but actually choreographed by the Berlin-based French choreographer Xavier Le Roy.

The show must go on (2001) brings together a cast of 20 performers, 19 pop songs, and one DJ. The piece was part of the repertory of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg between 2000 and 2005. It was also in the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet from 2007 until 2014. In 2003, Jérôme Bel took a sabbatical year. In October of that year, he was curator of the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven (Belgium) with Alain Platel. In 2004, he was invited to produce a piece for the Paris Opera Ballet: Véronique Doisneau, a theatrical documentary on the work of dancer Véronique Doisneau, a member of the company’s corps de ballet. The same year, he produced The show must go on 2 (2004), a piece which proved to be a failure for him and that he took out of the company’s repertory after performances in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and Singapore. The next year, invited to work in Bangkok by the curator Tang Fu Kuen, Bel produced Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005) with traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun. The production stages Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel discoursing on their artistic practices in spite of the abyssal cultural gap dividing them. Isabel Torres (2005) for the ballet of the Teatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro, is the Brazilian version of the production for the Paris Opera.

The Catalogue raisonné Jérôme Bel was published in 2008, analyzing Jérôme Bel’s works between 1994 and 2005. In 2009, Bel produced Cédric Andrieux, in the framework of a series of performances questioning performers’ experience and knowledge. The series now includes Véronique Doisneau (2004), Isabel Torres (2005), Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005), and Cédric Andrieux (2009). Cédric Andrieux was a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for eight years before joining the Lyon Opera Ballet. That same year, Jérôme Bel created A spectator (2009). A lecture performed by Jérôme Bel himself, the work consists of a one-hour monologue in which he recounts to the audience several of his experiences as a simple spectator. In 2010, together with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Bel created 3Abschied (2010), a performance based on Schönberg’s version of Gustav Mahler’s The Song of the Earth.

In 2012, Bel created Disabled Theater, a piece featuring the Zurich-based company Theater Hora, consisting of professional actors with learning disabilities. In Cour d’honneur (2013), he staged 14 people talking about their experiences as spectators in the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes at the Avignon Festival. In Gala (2015), Jérôme Bel staged professionals from the field of dance together with amateurs from various different backgrounds. In Tombe (2016), a performance created at the invitation of Opéra National de Paris, Bel asked several dancers of the ballet to invite a person with whom they would never share the stage for a duet.

Films of Bel’s performances have been presented at contemporary art biennials and in many museums. Bel also lectures regularly at several universities. In 2013, Emails 2009-2010, written by Bel together with the French choreographer Boris Charmatz, was published by Les Presses du Réel; an English and online version will be published this fall. Jérôme Bel received a Bessie Award for the performances of The show must go on in New York in 2005. In 2008, Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun received the Routes Princess Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity (European Cultural Foundation) for Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005). In 2013, Disabled Theater (2012) was selected for the Theatertreffen in Berlin and won the Swiss Dance Awards – Current Dance Works.

About The Joyce Theater

The mission of The Joyce Theater Foundation is to serve and support the art of dance and choreography, to promote the richness and variety of the art form in its fullest expression, and to advance the public interest in, and appreciation of, dance and the allied arts of music, design, and theater. www.joyce.org

About The Kitchen

The Kitchen is one of New York City’s oldest nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater, to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists’ talks, and lecture series. Since its inception, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence. www.thekitchen.org

About The Museum of Modern Art

Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world. www.moma.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

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) is New York’s premiere French cultural and language center. 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. www.fiaf.org

Merci!

Jérôme Bel programs are presented on the occasion of the Crossing the Line Festival 2016 by FIAF, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, and The Museum of Modern Art. Supported by Institut français and Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.

Crossing the Line 2016 is made possible with generous leadership support from Air France and Delta Air Lines, the official airlines of FIAF; Edmond de Rothschild Foundations; 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.

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

Twitter: @FIAFNY

Instagram: @FIAFNY

Facebook: FIAF / French Institute Alliance Française 

Hashtag: #CTL16

###