“The one fest to rule them all is L’Alliance’s Crossing the Line.” – Helen Shaw, The New Yorker
This year’s Crossing The Line festival highlights new collisions and experiments in audience and form, inviting art lovers to experience boundary-breaking visual art, music, film, dance, and theater across New York City and, for the first time in the festival’s history, in upstate New York. Featuring fourteen leading global artists, seven North American premieres and four New York premieres, the festival creates a unique opportunity for New York audiences to engage with thrilling and innovative international performance.
“Crossing The Line contributes to keeping our performing arts scene diverse, curious, and cutting-edge. This year, recent newcomers in the festival return with expanded runs and larger projects, while two artists make their US début. With roots in Greece, Guadeloupe, Rwanda, Nigeria or Vietnam, our line-up embraces migratory voices and encourages audiences to travel just as far in their imagination.”—Violaine Huisman, Crossing The Line Curator
Full Festival Lineup:
Crossing The Line 2026 kicks off in Chatham, New York at PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance. In the festival’s inaugural upstate expansion, Greek choreographer Lenio Kaklea returns to Crossing The Line with the acrobatic and engaging North American premiere of The Birds. At L’Alliance New York, renowned interdisciplinary artist Camille Henrot stages the New York premiere of her first theatrical project, Commedia dell’arte, co-presented with Performa, which sets the zany stock characters of the Italian Renaissance in a New York apartment building.
In October, choreographer Léo Lérus presents excerpts of Gounouj in Situ, inspired by the natural beauty of his native Guadeloupe and adapted for a site-specific performance on Governors Island. In Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York, dancer Simon Le Borgne and musician Ulysse Zangs bring their electric, energetic collaboration of live music and dance, Ad Libitum, to North America for the first time. Later in the month, Bessie Award-winning choreographers Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard experiment with artificial intelligence, memory, and dance in This Is Unreal at the Chocolate Factory Theater.
Closing out October at New York Live Arts, French and Rwandan choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza draws on the philosophical writings of Elsa Dorlin and Maryse Condé’s acclaimed novel in Toi, moi, Tituba… to transform her body into an archive for voices silenced throughout history. Meanwhile, Collectif Quatre Ailes presents the playful, family-friendly Mille secrets de poussins in Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York, a multimedia theatrical performance inspired by Claude Ponti’s beloved children’s books.
November begins in Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York with Mirlitons, a lively, percussive duet between leading French choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux. At BAM Fisher, sweat variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, continues a speculative trilogy exploring one family’s entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade in adaku, part 2. Also at BAM, in the Harvey Theater, visionary playwright and director Tiago Rodrigues returns to Crossing The Line for the third year in a row to present the North American premiere of the 2025 Festival d’Avignon’s breakout hit, La Distance, an epic story set between Earth and Mars in 2077.
The festival continues in Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York with the world premiere of the English language version of Losing Your Bag, a one-woman piece written by renowned French playwright Pascal Rambert and starring Pauline Chalamet. Meanwhile, Joris Lacoste presents a hybrid liturgy for our time in Nexus de l’adoration , a smash hit at the 2025 Festival d’Avignon and Festival d’Automne that features song, speech, choreography, and devotion which makes its North American premiere at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
The festival concludes in December with Saigon at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Returning after the sold-out US premiere of LACRIMA during last year’s Crossing The Line, writer and director Caroline Guiela Nguyen conjures up a vision of France as it exists beyond the limits it has been given; beyond its own borders. Since its acclaimed debut at the Festival d’Avignon in 2017, the play has toured internationally to extraordinary critical acclaim and is now widely considered one of the landmark productions of contemporary French theater. This long-awaited US premiere will mark the first opportunity for American audiences to experience the work live.
