CrossCurrents is a city-wide biennial performing arts festival that highlights innovative artists from around the world who are harnessing the power of performance to humanize global politics. The CrossCurrents festival features a wide range of work at different stages of development and engages conversations around critical topics with policymakers, artists, scholars, activists, and leaders.
Global Hip-Hop Dance party at The Gathering with Next Level, May 2019.
A Look at CrossCurrents 2019
The inaugural CrossCurrents included artists from Australia, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, and the UK. Something that guided our vision in selecting all the featured artists, from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to author Azar Nafisi, celebrated recording artist Somi, award-winning performers Pascale Armand, Kathleen Chalfant, Inua Ellams, and Heather Raffo, to cutting-edge companies like Ashtar Theatre (Palestine), En Garde Arts (New York), Phantom Limb Company (New York/Japan), and Renegade Theatre (Nigeria), was a desire to celebrate creators who define themselves as citizen-artists, and who see their work as a catalyst for actively interrogating difficult and essential questions.
Ineffable curatorial values that were central to CrossCurrents: a sense of underlying humanity, a generosity of spirit, and even tenderness in the work, a willingness of the artists to make themselves vulnerable in the face of these perilous challenges, and a genuine appetite to engage with the public and other experts on these issues. In the dozens of works that were seen in various stages of development throughout CrossCurrents and The Gathering in 2019, none of them led with cynicism or a sense of aloofness or superiority. Each in its way sought to remind us of our elemental humanity and to tap into the capacity for empathy that has been at the root of our art forms for thousands of years.
