Christian Rizzo

Christian Rizzo began his artistic career in Toulouse, where he formed a rock band and launched a clothing brand, before studying visual arts at Villa Arson in Nice and then turning to dance. In the 1990s and 2000s, he performed with numerous contemporary choreographers in Europe and helped create soundtracks and costumes. In 1996, Christian Rizzo founded the association fragile, within which he developed performances, installations, solo and collective pieces. At the same time, he worked in art schools in France and abroad, as well as in institutions dedicated to contemporary dance. From 2015 to 2024, he directed the CCN de Montpellier – Occitanie, renamed ICI (Institut Chorégraphique International), where he developed a cross-disciplinary vision of creation, training, and the sharing of practices. Since January 2025, his projects have once again been supported by association fragile. As an associate artist at the CN D in 2025 and 2026, he is pursuing choreographic, visual, and curatorial research, exploring the tension between body, space, and abstraction, where narratives emerge from gestures. 

“This workshop offers young artists a space for choreographic and performative research, informed by the themes that run through my work: the tension between narrative and abstraction, the creation of collective forms without erasing individuality, attention to gesture, the image as a trigger for writing, and the poetic power of what lies beyond the frame. Gestures are seen as central points of articulation: neither a simple form nor an expressive tool, but an active trace, a remnant, a fragment of narrative or abstraction in motion. Using personal material – memories, images, sensations – each participant will develop gestural scores that will serve as the basis for a composition in dialogue with other bodies, space, and the time of the performance. In this approach, what is off-screen becomes a dramaturgical and poetic lever, activating the invisible, the void, and anticipation. It transforms the shared space into a place of fragile apparitions where gestures are constructed as much in what is present as in what is missing.”
Christian Rizzo