Crossing the Line

The French Institute Alliance Française pops up in venues throughout the city for its annual Crossing the Line Festival, a rare and all-too-brief opportunity to see French-speaking artists making theatre, music, art, and dance. This year, the lineup includes Marion Siéfert’s multimedia Instagram monodrama, “_jeanne_dark_,” in which a persecuted sixteen-year-old defends her virginity to her demanding online followers (Sept. 14-15, at Florence Gould Hall); Étienne Minoungou in “Traces—Speech to African Nations,” with a text based on the writings of the Senegalese economist and poet Felwine Sarr (Sept. 21, at Abrons Arts Center); the musical-theatre work “Freedom, I’ll have lived your dream until the very last day,” featuring Sarr himself, a hugely influential figure in the art-repatriation movement (Sept. 24, at Florence Gould Hall); and the première of “Fire in the Head,” a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky rooted in the collaboration between Indonesian shadow puppeteers and the artist Christopher Myers (Sept. 29-30, at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association). The festival runs through Oct. 28. (Sept. 10-Oct. 29.)