Joris Lacoste: Nexus de l’adoration

Nine officiants take the stage and begin to praise. They sing, chant, testify, and dance their way through the world’s vast repertoire of devotion, gestures, and phrases gathered across faiths, cultures, and contexts and set loose in a single rite. Part concert, part ceremony, part something with no name yet, Joris Lacoste‘s Nexus de l’adoration asks a live question: with the old certainties gone, what does a fractured age still gather to worship?

Fresh from its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon, the piece is by turns hypnotic, funny, and genuinely strange, a service for no religion in particular that turns collective attention into its true subject. Avignon called it a world where nine officiants sing, dance, and speak; the Festival d’Automne, a ceremony that looks a little like a musical. It closes NYU Skirball’s fall with communal attention itself as the medium.

Co-presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival.

NYU Skirball’s programs are made possible in part with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the Howard Gilman Foundation; Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels; Culture Ireland; The Shubert Foundation; Collins Building Services; General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA; Goethe Institut New York with support from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany; Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; Harkness Foundation for Dance; and Marta Heflin Foundation; as well as our valued donors through memberships, commissioning, and Allies for Arts Access Fund support.

This project is made possible in part with support from Villa Albertine and Albertine Foundation through the Theatre & New Forms program, and the Harkness Foundation for Dance.