L’Alliance New York’s Artistic Director Violaine Huisman Talks Crossing The Line
When Violaine Huisman joined L’Alliance as Artistic Director in August 2023, she brought with her decades of incredible experience and lauded accomplishments. Paris-born Huisman had a career in publishing before working in programming at Brooklyn Academy of Music; starting in 2005, she became a guest curator for L’Alliance. Huisman is also a celebrated author—her first novel, The Book of Mother, was released in America in 2021 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her second novel, 2024’s Les Monuments de Paris, received the Prix Anna de Noailles from the Académie Française and the inaugural Prix Littéraire Who’s Who. We sat down with Huisman to discuss what audiences can expect from her debut curation of L’Alliance’s Crossing The Line festival, which runs now through December 7.
What exactly is Crossing The Line festival?
At its heart, it is a multidisciplinary festival that intends to cross the line between forms and between parts of the city. The idea is to present experimental forms, hybridity of forms, and experiments between genres. It’s our signature festival here at L’Alliance, now in its 17th edition, and it was founded by Lili Chopra, who’s my predecessor as Artistic Director here. It’s a great honor to be curating it for the first time.
Where is this year’s CTL festival taking place?
Beyond our Florence Gould Theater here on the Upper East Side, we also have performances at New York Live Arts in Chelsea, Skirball on the NYU campus, in Queens, on Governors Island, and in Brooklyn. That’s a very exciting feature of the festival for us, to allow New Yorkers all over the city to experience the art that we’re bringing to these stages.
What is your proudest accomplishment in your first year as CTL curator?
I’m most proud of the diversity of works that we’re presenting, our extraordinary range of partners, and I’m also very honored and excited to be presenting four artists for the first time in the U.S. It’s a really bold decision that we made this year, to introduce new voices to American audiences, and I look forward to seeing how New Yorkers react.
How do you select CTL’s performers and artists?
I go to see works in New York, but also in different cities around North America and in Europe, and I try to seek the most appropriate performances for our festival. A lot of the work that I do is also in partnership with the institutions with whom we create and produce this festival—some of them in this year’s edition include Skirball, BAM, Chocolate Factory Theater, and New York Live Arts.
Tell us about CTL’s special family-oriented program.
We’re very proud to be presenting this for the first time within Crossing The Line, because the festival is inclusive of all genres, and also of all generations and ages. This work, Le Petit B by Marion Muzac, is an extremely elegant work of choreography that’s addressed to children as young as 18 months. It’s a gorgeous, whimsical performance in the very intimate context of our Le Skyroom space.
Who is one of the CTL artists you’re most excited about hosting?
Jérôme Bel really stands out as one of the defining artists of the festival. He works in the medium of choreography, but he has spent his entire career defying what choreography means. This work we’re presenting he calls an auto-choreography, meaning a self-portrait through his work with dance. Because Jérôme no longer travels by plane for ecological reasons, he offers this performance for local institutions to produce on their own. For our iteration, we invited the wonderful actress April Matthis to perform; Steve Cosson of The Civilians will be directing her. Our performance also includes a surprise at the end with the special guest appearance of Catherine Gallant as Isadora Duncan.
Speaking of choreographers—you have another dancer performing, and he’s helping unveil a refreshed space at L’Alliance, correct?
Yes, Adam Linder is an Australian-born dancer and choreographer, and his work we’re presenting here will inaugurate our new Le Skyroom space on the top floor of L’Alliance. It’s a gorgeous, flexible space where Adam will perform his lecture demonstration called Mothering the Tongue, in which he expresses his relationship with choreography and what it means to him. He is just an unbelievably moving dancer and it’s very powerful to see him perform, especially in such an intimate context.
Tell us about the art display you have planned in conjunction with CTL’s other events.
The exhibit that we’re presenting, Glowing Heads, is a combination of paintings and sculptures. It’s by Nina Childress, an American artist based in Paris. She teaches at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and is one of the few women—and certainly the only American-born woman—to be inducted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which is a huge privilege.
She’s worked her entire career with painting, and portraiture is her signature feature—the exhibit really underscores this. It takes over the entire lobby of L’Alliance, and also in the gallery is a presentation of phosphorescent works that glow in the dark with ultraviolet lights. It’s a feature that Childress used to work with at the very beginning of her career when she was a punk artist painting in clubs.
What is a notable feature from CTL’s film program?
For a whole weekend in November, we’re inaugurating a film series called Back and Forth: Dialogues with Painting and Film, and the idea is really to showcase the hybridity of forms within Crossing The Line with a program that looks at painting, films about painting, and painters making films. We have a really extraordinary slate of works, including a work by Philippe Garrel and a work by Alain Resnais filming Guernica—it’s a very rare film that audiences will probably never get a chance to see outside of this presentation.
Violaine Huisman’s meticulously curated, borough-spanning Crossing The Line festival runs through December 7, and you won’t want to miss it! Find more information about every event in the series and secure your tickets here.
Photo Credit ©Pascal Perich