Christian Rizzo

During the premiere of ni fleurs, ni ford mustang [neither flowers, nor ford mustang] in 2004 at the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, Christian Rizzo met the dancer Julie Guibert; before long, he felt the desire to write a solo form for her, exploring her way of inhabiting the stage. Slowly tailor-made for her, like a garment, this contemplative solo is placed in the indeterminate – on the frontier of a ritual and an artistic installation. Instead of using a choreographic approach, which Christian Rizzo’s entire work seeks to subvert, he has adopted the skills of a goldsmith or calligrapher, cutting up the per-former’s body, sculpting it directly in space as in a bas-relief. In a casing sculpted by Caty Olive’s vacillating lighting, Julie Guibert’s figure brings out buried aesthetic layers: each gesture is a glimpse through a perceptive door, infusing an image – into which echoes of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s Nymph of Fontainebleau then glide. Is this really a solo? The presence of a chimerical figure, straight out of a David Lynch film, which remodels the space around her, composes a duet of shadows busying about the preparations for an enigmatic ceremony.

Christian Rizzo is a versatile artist, at the same time dancer, choreographer, musician and fashion designer. His work in dance dates back to the 1990s. Initially a performer for numerous choreographers, he began to create his own pieces within the association Fragile, composing malleable sensory spaces open to correspondences and collaboration, giving rise to installations, performances or dance pieces, such as D’après une histoire vraie (2013). As head of the Centre chorégraphique national de Montpellier since 2015, he has continued this research into breaking down barriers between practices and forging connections between knowledge, bodies and spaces.