Mothering the Tongue

American-born artist Nina Childress—recently inducted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts—takes over L’Alliance New York’s public spaces with vibrant, fluorescent paintings and newly commissioned murals that showcase her unique, lifelong, and incisively critical engagement with portraiture.

Praised by The New York Times as one of the “Top European Productions of 2022” during its run at the Avignon Festival, One Song combines a live competition and a concert, inviting us to form a community, lift each other up, and ask how one song can give meaning to a whole society.

Originally commissioned for a Cycladic island, then restaged in both the Tuileries and Versailles gardens, Greek-born and Paris-based choreographer Lenio Kaklea designed this piece as a response to physical landscape consisting of three distinct levels of spectatorship—near, far, and very far away.

The Greek-born and Paris-based international choreographic star makes her North American debut with what she terms a “rewilding of bodies”—a starkly minimalist transformation of space using a cluster of metal poles to evoke the physical and imaginary powers of the forest.

Returning to the US for the first time in several years, French transplant DD Dorvillier crafts a solo in collaboration with sound artist Sébastien Roux, structured by dance scores that emerged from a dream. In this work dance digs as an archeologist, as the dancer’s present is confronted by an immediate sonic past, as she moves towards the future.

A trashy American musical, an absurd cabaret, and a techno oratorio of gender stereotypes, Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet’s Showgirl simultaneously embodies and deconstructs the glory, glitter, and gore of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 cult film.

Quartiers libres (free rein) explores and reveals those peculiar spaces we are trapped in, those forbidden places where we choose to wander: spaces open to endless possibilities, spaces to surrender and allow for revelation. 12 years after its premiere in France, Nadia Beugré revisits her emblematic solo with two emerging artists from the Ivory Coast.

Inspired by the Lila ceremonies, traditional mystical and musical celebrations of his native Morocco, Ismaël Mouaraki explores trance with a group of male dancers in his newest creation. Through them, the French-Moroccan-Canadian retraces his own journey before the eyes of the public. Meaning “night” in Arabic, a “Lila” is a set of nocturnal healing rituals that blends singing, dancing, and music, traditionally found in some North African countries.

Last in BAM in 2021 with his internationally acclaimed work By Heart (NYT Critic’s Pick), Festival d’Avignon Artistic Director Tiago Rodrigues brings his uniquely political vision of theater back to New York with this gripping original drama that marries the burning issues of today with the ghosts of our past as only live performance can.

Created especially for very young children, Le Petit B engages its audience through interactive play, choice, and spatial exploration. Created by award-winning choreographer Marion Muzac and visual artist Émilie Faïf, this charming, immersive experience offers an inventive landscape peopled by two dancers and warm, inviting cushions that evoke the comfort of a mother’s breasts.

Chris Marker follows Roberto Matta. Alain Resnais ponders Guernica. Philippe Garrel searches with Frédéric Pardo. Niki de Saint Phalle spins a fairy tale. Anthony Ramos takes his practice abroad. For two days, painters and filmmakers in France and America will volley back and forth ideas and experimental forms across the canvas and the screen. Films to include Marker’s Matta ’85 and Garrel’s Le Berceau de cristal.

Combining solo performance with an art scene from the peripheries and the Antilles, this two day celebration centers around transdisciplinary artist Bintou Dembélé’s grassroot investigations into the concept of “marronnage”—a term historically identified with enslaved peoples’ escape from the plantation, but which has come to signify the fugitivity of the body, spirit and soul from all forms of current oppression, in order to create new societies.