Biennale: Christian Rizzo, the dance of joy
In the shadow of gestures and things that happen without our noticing, attention suddenly unfolds. What if the smallest everyday life were the space, if not the place, that connects us to the invisible?
This is how Christian Rizzo introduces In the Shadow of a Vast Detail, Outside the Storm, his next creation. “For me,” he explains, “entering with gestures, whatever they may be, is always a way of inhabiting space, particularly here where it is domestic gestures that interest me, those of culinary art, work or craftsmanship, and which would not, strictly speaking, be gestures, at the start, of the history of dance but rather of the history of everyday life, and what inspires me is not where they come from but what they produce; they are anchored in the concrete but can drift and provoke surprising moments. In this piece, unlike others, the gestures are not in contact with an object as a support point. Thus, the experience of spatiality becomes other, it gives birth to an empty space that nevertheless conducts poetry, counter-forms that put us in relation to something that is not visible, that has not yet taken place, that remains suspended. It is in this time of suspension that otherness is created, the expectation of the other, the possibility that something will happen that brings joy.”
A detail cannot be a small thing
On stage, Rizzo invites for the first time texts by Célia Houdart which will take their place in the choreographic writing. He continues his work without hierarchy between the movements of dance, sound composition and light, adding here those of reading.
“It’s a piece where there’s a lot of dancing because there’s no connection with the objects. This means that the movement is made by and with the space at the same time and with the other.”
To the question about the title, all in contrast, he answers: “The titles of my pieces are all important, they must have a sort of promise, a hypothesis, be a field of work. I like to name in a poetic way something that precisely does not yet have a form at the moment it is danced, it came to me almost in one go. The question of detail is extremely important for me, I work around that, it is the multiplicity of detail that allows me to write, to conceive something in its entirety. It is perhaps a distortion of my training as a visual artist/art historian. I have always been attracted by how a detail informs the whole, one could say the opposite as well. But in any case, the relationship between detail and the whole has always fascinated me. And indeed, I really like to put vast next to detail, a detail cannot be a small thing, in the shadow, that is to say that we do not show it as such, and we are in any case in its echo and out of the storm because I believe that I have also been looking for a form of calm and serenity for a long time.”
In the shadow of a vast detail, out of the storm - Christian Rizzo – September 16 and 17 at the Maison de la danse
Lyon Capitale
