Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present the glittering CHAMBRE as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 10 – October 4, free – $35
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
Tickets are now available for FIAF’s ninth annual late summer/early fall multidisciplinary arts festival, and you better act fast if you want to see some of this year’s most intriguing programs. For us, the highlight is Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, an installation and performance piece at the New Museum inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids and pop-culture elements, with extravagant costumes by Reid Bartelme and experimental sound and music by twi-ny fave Roarke Menzies. British artist Ant Hampton’s Autoteatro series continues with The Extra People, in which participants will go on an individual adventure through FIAF’s Florence Gould Theater. The U.S. premiere of Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciriaco and Austrian artist Andrea Sonnberger’s Here whilst we walk will take small groups, bound by a giant rubber band, on a silent trip through Red Hook. Elana Langer’s free What I Live By will pop up at three locations, examining brand identification and personal values. Iranian artist Ali Moini searches for freedom in the multimedia dance work Lives at New York Live Arts (NYLA). Miguel Gutierrez will present the New York City premiere of all three parts of his Age & Beauty series, Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/; Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&; and Dancer or You can make whatever the fuck you want but you’ll only tour solos or The Powerful People or We are strong/We are powerful/We are beautiful/We are divine or &:’////, at NYLA, featuring such collaborators as Mickey Mahar, Michelle Boulé, Jen Rosenblit, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Alex Rodabaugh. Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni asks Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? in his unique interpretation of Bavarian folk dance at NYLA. French director Joris Lacoste investigates multiple languages and human spoken expression in Suite n°2 in Florence Gould Hall. Also on the bill are Shezad Dawood’s “It was a time that was a time” exhibition at Pioneer Works, a photography show by Mazaccio & Drowilal in the FIAF Gallery, Olivia Bransbourg’s ICONOfly magazine, and Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki’s three-day symposium, “Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance,” at FIAF and MoMA.
Czech master Jan Švankmajer’s debut feature-length film is a unique and unusual trip inside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But this being Švankmajer, who began making creepy and fun stop-motion animated shorts in 1964, this is not a traditional telling. “Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film made for children — perhaps,” Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) says at the beginning. “But — I nearly forgot — you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Sitting on the bank of a river, Alice tries to look at the book being read by her older sister (the figure is possibly a doll; the audience never sees the head), but Alice gets slapped, so she soon creates her own story in her head, as a taxidermied white rabbit comes alive and she follows it into a desk drawer and enters a weird, fantastical land where she alternates between being a regular-sized girl, a giantess, and a small doll. She encounters Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the beheading-crazed queen, a live piglet, and his other oddball creatures as she keeps finding keys that lead her into stranger and stranger places. She never smiles as her curiosity grows, very much a child with natural fears about what awaits her in the future. Alice gives different voices to all the characters as she narrates the tale, with all the lines identifying the speaker (“said the white rabbit,” “cried out the Mad Hatter and the March Hare”) accompanied by an extreme and disconcerting close-up of Alice’s mouth saying the words. Alice has constructed a dark world in her imagination, one that is not nearly as playful as the one created by Carroll. Švankmajer’s (Faust, Little Otik) use of dolls, puppets, and bizarre sets is impressively peculiar as the story takes grotesque twists and turns that are certainly not for younger children. Alice is screening August 19 as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn electronics duo Xeno and Oaklander, and Eastern European food will be available from Bear; the summer festival concludes August 26 with Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. And be sure to get there early to check out the 
