Christian Rizzo

miramar is like the name of a promise, one that you can sense from the window of a quaintly dilapidated hotel. It’s a promise that haunts Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea and is rooted in saudade songs.
As light arcs and reflects about the stage in a machine-like ballet, a first dancer emerges to inscribe the space, his body held fast to a vantage point. Ten dancers, characters in search of new horizons, join him. Drawn to his gaze, they form the flow that connects and separates him from the power beyond our sight. Yet, between the dancer’s watchful eye from his fixed vantage point and the endless line of the horizon, what can we see? Longing, emptiness or hope from afar, from “over there” or “elsewhere”?
Following on from Une Maison and En son lieu, the choreography combines the invisible with physical shapes and forms. The figures are halfway between the past and the future, each with separate perspectives shifting, perhaps, to a common yearning.


Christian Rizzo was born in 1965, in Cannes, France. He took his first steps as an artist in Toulouse, where he formed a rock band, before starting studying visual arts in Nice. In 1996, he created L’Association Fragile, which he used to present dance performances, while making the new commissioned projects in the field of fashion and visual arts known. From 2007 to 2012, he was artist in residence at Lille’s Opera. He is currently seen as one of the most prominent names of French performing arts, and he was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, a commendation given by the French Government. He has been the director of the National Choreographic Centre of Montpellier-Occitany since 2015.


Streaming:
30/04 (19h30) — 1/05 (19h30) — Site DDD