From September 18-December 20, 2026, L’Alliance New York will present Crossing The Line Festival, an international survey of new experiments in audience and form, highlighting a diversity of artists working at the intersections of visual art, music, film, dance, and theater.
L’Alliance New York’s acclaimed Crossing The Line Festival celebrates dynamic artists and diverse perspectives from around the French-speaking world, in partnership with New York City’s leading art institutions. The program comprises an array of groundbreaking, thought-provoking film, music, dance, theater, installation, and performance, many of which are world, U.S., North American, or New York premieres. The works celebrate diversity, inclusion, and hope, and represent the urgency of dialogue in this country and across oceans.
“Crossing The Line as a platform for French and francophone creation keeps our local performing arts scene diverse, curious, and cutting-edge. This year, recent newcomers in the festival come back 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,” said Violaine Huisman, Crossing The Line Curator.
Dance programming in the 2026 edition of Crossing The Line spans themes of ecology, identity, memory and transformation through a diverse slate of international premieres presented across New York City and beyond. The season opens in September at PS21 in Chatham, New York, with the New York premiere of Lenio Kaklea’s The Birds, an exploration of avian movement and behavior that reflects on the delicate balance between freedom and subjugation. Environmental concerns continue in Léo Lérus’ site-specific Traces of Gounouj on Governors Island, where movement inspired by his native Guadeloupe considers resilience, adaptation and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
The festival’s later dance offerings turn toward questions of personal reinvention, technology and historical memory. In Ad Libitum, dancer Simon Le Borgne and musician Ulysse Zangs combine movement and live music in a meditation on transformation and self-renewal, while Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard’s This Is Unreal blurs the boundaries between human memory and artificial intelligence through movement generated by both body and algorithm. Dorothée Munyaneza’s Toi, moi, Tituba… amplifies silenced voices through dance and music, François Chaignaud and Aymeric Hainaux’s Mirlitons merges choreography and beatboxing in a genre-defying exchange, and Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s adaku, part 2, invites audiences into cycles of ritual and repair while examining the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
For more information on this year’s Festival, and to reserve tickets, visit https://lallianceny.org/crossing-the-line-festival/. Tickets for all shows will go on sale at the end of July.
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