NEW YORK, September 3, 2015 – The Cultural Services of the French Embassy, in partnership with FACE Foundation and Institut français, is proud to support several major performing arts productions opening in the US this month. Innovative and multidisciplinary, these creations are all US premieres and reflect the vitality of the new French scene. The convergence of disciplines –theater, dance, visual arts, literature – allows the emergence of new formats and ideas echoing chore issues of our contemporary societies.The Round by Martial Chazallon and Martin Chaput
Sept. 4, 5 & 6 - Brattleboro, VT
An unconventional performance experience created by French duo Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, and local residents, sends audiences out of the theater and into the streets for a choreographed journey of downtown Brattleboro, during the Progressive Performance festival, organized by Vermont Performance Lab. Over the last decade, Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon have been inventing new ways of challenging audiences’ perceptions of their surroundings. Their immersive performance experiences expand our notions of dance, affirming our sense of the body and its presence in the everyday environment.Suite no. 2 by Joris Lacoste
Sept. 10-11 - Crossing the Line Festival, FIAF, New York, NYSept. 15-16 - Fringe Arts Festival, Philadelphia, PA
Joris Lacoste’s artistic biography resembles a patchwork of highly diverse formats and ranges from show and performance to exhibition and even the development of parlour game concepts. All of these fields are combined in Encyclopédie de la parole, a vast online archive of voice recordings initiated in 2007, with a group of musicians, directors, visual artists and writers. From this collection, L’Encyclopédie de la parole produces sound pieces, performance and shows, lectures, games and exhibitions. Suite no. 2 is part of this project. Both poignant and uproarious, the performance celebrates the virtuosity of the spoken word.Performance in multiple languages, with English subtitles.La mélancolie des dragons by Philippe Quesne
Sept.10-13, On The Boards, Seattle, WASept. 17-18, Time Based Art Festival , Portland, ORSept. 23-26, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA
Originally a visual artist, Philippe Quesne turned to performing arts in 2003, when he founded Vivarium Studio, a laboratory for theatrical innovation which features painters, actors, dancers, musicians, and animals. His work has been staged all over the world, from Avignon to Tokyo. La Mélancolie des dragons is one of his major productions. Filled with Quesne’s disarming wit and hints of magical realism, La Mélancolie is set amid a snowy landscape where a band of metal-heads is on a quest to build an amusement park devoted to hard-rock. Philippe Quesne is now the director of Theatre Amandiers-Nanterre.Performances in French with English subtitles.
Two performances by Radhouane El Meddeb Sept. 15-16, Time Based Art Festival, Portland, OR
Radhouane El Meddeb is a Tunisian choreographer based in France. Time Based Art Festival will present two performances as part of the TBA Festival Flight: Identity & the Body, which reflects a range of artists who engage the embodied politics and poetics of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and their intersections.In Je danse et je vous en donne à bouffer, El Meddeb is immersed in his loves of dancing and cooking. Seated before his couscous maker, he performs and prepares couscous with generosity and poetry.In Au temps où les Arabes dansaient, he harkens back to the glory age of Arab cinema in a bittersweet dance work performed by four men. It’s a volcanic dance on the precipice of chaos to come.Seuls en scène 2015 – Princeton French Theater Festival
Sept. 24 – Oct. 24, Princeton, NJ
The Princeton French Theater Festival, free and open to the public, will present nine productions featuring celebrated French actors, directors, and promising, early career artists. With text-based productions from authors such as Laurent Mauvigner, Pascal Rambert, Koffi Kwahulé, the Festival is curated and organized by Florent Masse, Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian, and Director of L’Avant-Scène, the French Theater Workshop.The highlights of the festival include Loin d’eux, a monologue directed and performed by Rodolphe Dana, Ajax, qu’on me donne un ennemi, a musical theater performance created by Mathieu Bauer with French actor André Wilms, De mes propres mains, performed by Arthur Nauzyciel, and Interview, a preview of Nicolas Truong’s new production which will be part of the 2016 official Avignon Theater Festival.
About
ABOUT THE CULTURAL SERVICES OF THE FRENCH EMBASSYThe Cultural Services of the French Embassy provides a platform for exchange and innovation between French and American artists, intellectuals, educators, students, the tech community, and the general public. Based in New York City, Washington D.C., and eight other cities across the US, the Cultural Services develops the cultural economy by focusing on six principal fields of action: the arts, literature, cinema, the digital sphere, French language and higher education. www.frenchculture.org