Skill interconnections. Since 2011, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has coordinated New Settings, an annual international programme dedicated to the performing arts. A programme bringing original art to life. Choreographers and stage directors infusing words and movements with a visual sensibility. Visual artists exposing their work to the demands of the stage and to the test of time. Together, they are inventing new languages.
Inaugurated by the French Institute Alliance Française in 2006, the Crossing the Line festival is a fixture on New York’s autumn cultural calendar. Every year, the programme invites performances from all around the world and with one shared trajectory: crossing the line, connecting skills.
Since 2012, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and the festival have been engaged in a productive partnership based around their shared values. Each year, the festival makes its selection of performances from the New Settings programme, bringing them to new audiences in New York.
2017 marks the fifth anniversary of this partnership. A planetarium sets the scene; a musical, sonic and visual score add colour and texture to the ambiance. American writer and director Annie Dorsen will perform The Great Outdoors to audiences in the USA before it is unveiled in France. Plus two other artists who will also see their works unveiled to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. Choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni with UNTITLED_I Will Be There When You Die, in which juggling becomes first a challenge and then a race against impending death. And Corbeaux, a piece by choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, which invites Moroccan performers to select a group of women volunteers and to teach them breathing exercises and litany, before entering in an almost trance-like state.
Since 2013, the following works have been performed on stages in New York: SYSTEMA OCCAM by Xavier Veilhan and Eliane Radigue, Urban Renewal by Kyle DeCamp and Joshua Thorson, Passage à l’Acte by Fanny de Chaillé and Philippe Ramette, Travelling Lady by Jessica Mitrani and Rossy de Palma, QUANTUM by Gilles Jobin and Julius Von Bismark, Lives by Ali Moini, Suite n°2 by Joris Lacoste, and the eighth episode of Life and Times, an epic biographical saga by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
