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  • 11.19.10

Christian Rizzo in conversation with John Jasperse

French choreographer Christian Rizzo talks with American choreographer John Jasperse about Rizzo’s work b.c. janvier 1545, fontainebleau, which had its New York premiere at The Kitchen in September/October 2010.

Interview date: September 30, 2010

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John Jasperse: The first work of yours I saw was 100% Polyester, which actually I saw on video. I would describe it as a little bit like a dance without a body. Maybe this is the most overt example I can think of, but still I feel like there always has been a consistent interest in the immaterial, or in the absent or erased body, in your work. I’m wondering if you think that this is an accurate statement, and if so, could you talk a little bit about why it’s interesting to you, and how you see it in your work? Or if it’s not, is there some other way in which you could say, “Well, no, it’s not that, it’s this other thing?”

Christian Rizzo: What is funny for me about 100% Polyester is that when I did it first, in fact, it was a costume that I made for someone, but finally this person didn’t want to wear it. So I had this costume and I said, “Perhaps I want to make this costume dance by itself.” So, of course, the absence was really clear. But I didn’t really understand it like that at first. I think it was more after that I considered that [absence]; finally, it was kind of manifesto. What we are working on, it’s not specific to the dresses—for example, in 100% Polyester—or the space, but it’s all the parts between. It’s what I sometimes call the negative space or the empty space. The emphasis is always on this thing.

John: So it’s almost like one of those things where . . . you read this revisionist theory about the concerns, but in some way the concerns are actually there naturally from circumstance. And they [the concerns] are intuitively understood in the doing, more than, “I’m setting out to make a piece that’s about the absent body.”

Christian: I never work with a concept first. When I start to work it’s because I need to be at work. It’s my first desire. I wake up, and I say, “Now I have to create a form.” Because I’m more formal than conceptual. I have more the vision of the form, and after I’m working, that’s when I start to understand why I chose this form.

John: Just to clarify, when you say “a form,” are you speaking about the visual environment, or is the form something innately about the structure of the work, or is it the person?

Christian: When I say, “form,” I think it’s more like a filter through which I look at the world. I am looking at the world and I say, “Well, now I have to create new glasses to look at the world.”

John: In the past you’ve talked about your choreographic work as “writing bodies in space—”

Christian: —and in time, of course!

John: And in time. We’ll get to that. So in French you talk about écriture chorégraphique, or choreographic writing, and you talk about the choreographer as an auteur, or author. There’s all of this language that’s embedded in French nomenclature that relates choreographic artistic process to writing practice, but it seems like what you’re talking about is something more specific than that cultural perspective that’s embedded in the language. I’m wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.

Christian: I couldn’t write a book, so I know that the only thing I can do is to write in space. I’m very attached to this idea that each piece is like the next tome in my diary. I’m not very attached to the dance as material. For example, if I were really a writer, a book writer, I would choose the vocabulary, but I would not invent words. I’m going to use words that already exist and make combinations of these words to find my own taste of writing. And I think that the dance is a little bit like that. I’m going to use the dancer, and I’m just here to grab some movement that the dancer invented. Perhaps this project with Julie is a little bit different, but usually I let the dancer find the dance, the movement, and then after, when I have this material, I really start my work, which is to . . . I would say to tordre—

John: To twist.

Christian: Yeah, to twist the thing, to cut it, to edit. I think sometimes I am like an editor to the thing. Sometimes I relate my work to people who take a documentary, and they start to edit the thing . . .

John: They collage, and they edit with found material.

Christian: I sometimes feel like that. But at the same time I’m creating a lot of my own images. So it’s between my own unconscious or instinctive things and what the dancer is giving me—the material. And then how do I bring them together to create a harmonic thing or a friction? And how do I build a space? It’s always the space between the things . . . the space between two bodies, the space between the performance and the audience, which is, for me, very important.

John: It sounds like you’re talking about spaces in-between that aren’t just physical spaces, but that are also ideological spaces.

Christian: Of course. And there’s always this kind of fluidity . . . The flux between the things: That’s, for me, what is important.

John: So before we get into too many other things, I wanted to talk about the piece at The Kitchen, b.c. janvier 1545, fontainebleau. So the title refers to Benvenuto Cellini and “the Nymph of Fontainebleau.” I just want to interject here that I’ve always found “Perseus and the Head of Medusa” to be really sexy, so that’s my preferred Cellini sculpture. (laughter) But anyway, that’s a pretty Eurocentric art history reference, so probably not a lot of Americans are even going to have this reference—

Christian: Even the French.

John: There comes this question about reference—the importance or lack thereof of the legibility of that reference.

Christian: So first, the title. It’s not about Benvenuto Cellini, really. It’s this moment: It’s January, in Fontainebleau, with Benvenuto Cellini. Because this day, in January, in Fontainebleau.

I found it [the history] in this book, which I was reading, about what in German they call the Wunderkammer, or, in French, le cabinet de curiosités, which I’m very interested in. So when the museum appeared, we started to organize the things by theme. Before the museum, we had these Wunderkammer, where it was more someone who decided to put in the same room all of the things he wanted to have, and also the knowledge about the world—so it could be some scientific things, some poetical things—and he just organized them to help him to look at the world.

So in this book, I read that Benvenuto Cellini had to deliver two sculptures to Francois I. But he didn’t—he just brought one this day. And he decided to light it with candles around, he asked a musician to play around, and finally he started to move the sculpture.

John: He was an installation artist! (laughter)

Christian: He did a hybrid performance! So I said, “Wow. I’m gonna put this title just for that.” Because in this period, which is in the sixteenth century in Fontainebleau—

John: —during the Renaissance—

Christian: Yes. There is one hybrid performance already. Like, some interdisciplinarity. I’m fed-up that [when we talk about art history] we start with Black Mountain, with Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, blah blah blah, during the 50s. I’m a little bit like that (gesturing) . . .  How do you say . . . ?

John: Up to here?

Christian: Up to here that in the dance field, and also in the visual art field, all the people are talking about history, references, “rereading the modern.” And I say, “OK, if we are talking about history . . . History in art doesn’t start in the 50s.” Because it’s started to be like, “Oh, what is the winner reference?” So it [the title] was for me a little bit of a joke, in a way, about that.

John: In talking about reference . . . There was a moment when the serious artist was supposed to respond to high art, and then there was this moment when the serious artist was supposed to reject that and embrace the inclusion of low art. That window of what-is-the-right-thing-to-be-concerned-about is moving around, which brings me to this question about fashion and style, freshness, and what is contemporary. And neither you nor I is twenty years old, so both of us have begun a process of moving away from “freshness,” if we want to talk about that.

Christian: For me, now, this idea of “contemporary” is connected with the juncture of what’s happening around me and things that are totally archaic. So there is no reference about this time or that time [alone]; it’s the complexity of the time.

All photos: Marc Domage

John: I wanted to talk a little bit about Julie, who is performing—or is the collaborator—in b.c. janvier 1545, fontainebleau. I wanted to talk a little bit about her training as a classical ballet dancer, which is a training that you don’t have, and the way in which that is present or not in the work. Classical ballet, being something that’s so hard to learn, often imprints itself on your personhood in a way that is quite profound. And it reshapes your entire relationship to embodiment. I’m wondering about working with a classical dancer but not making a classical ballet.

Christian: For me, I don’t know about this “classical training.” When I’m working with a dancer, I take the movement they are producing, so I don’t have any archaic movement. When I’m looking at a ballet dancer or at one of my best friends who is in almost all of my pieces who is a drawer, not a dancer, I look at all the movements and—like what I was saying about words—I look at how I am going to combine them. For me it’s someone who came with his own history, the body history. And in a way I like that. What I love about Julie is . . . It’s so deep in her. She’s had so many different trainings. It’s also why I wanted to work with her. I met her at the Lyon Opera Ballet. When I was looking at her, I was almost looking just at her. I didn’t see the others because I had this feeling that each time she was doing something, it was right. In time, in space. I mean, she was sitting, and I would just look because I had the feeling that everything was connected. I’m always talking about intelligence when I talk about Julie because I can see it: When she’s moving the shoulder, I can see all the space around it moving. Because she’s so deep in the work she’s doing. Every day she has yoga and then ballet training, and I’m totally fascinated by this. I think I love all the people who are doing something and go deeper in [that] something. It could be cooking, it could be building houses, it could be a hairdresser. I mean, when people are involved and they don’t stop on the technique: They try to use this technique to push it a little bit more and the more they push it, the more they are opening something . . .

John: My last question is about André Lepecki, who is a Portuguese dance and performance theorist, and his ideas about the ontology of dance . . . He talks about the way in which there have been what he sees as false assumptions about dance’s essential nature, assumptions about a signature or privileged domain of dance which relates to movement. My understanding is that he thinks it [dance’s essential nature] has more to do with the problematic relationship of the body existing in time. So then you have this discussion over in the popular journalism world, where people like Dominique Frétard have come up with this word “non-danse” to talk about it. I get a little bit frustrated with that vocabulary because I feel like it just reflects a lack of any other way to congeal these various researches into one thing that we can call an artistic movement of this time. I wanted to ask about whether you feel there’s a cohesion of artists and if you feel like the kinds of language that I’m citing are representative of the central locus of that community. And if you do feel a part of something and it’s not centered around the body existing in time, do you have any idea what it is centered around?

Christian: I think that perhaps for me I’m not following so much the theoretical things.

John: Because you’re not interested in it, or—

Christian: Yeah. I’m not interested in it. I think I believe more in poetry and literature. I don’t read anything [theoretical]. I used to a lot, and then one day I took everything and I put it in my library. And it stays here, and I feel better. (laughter) Because I started to have too many questions that I almost started to lose my intuition of working. I love to fight, too, with my own questions . . . I remember that I was reading a lot of things because, in a way, I wanted to have some answer. And finally I have more and more questions!

(laughter)

Like what we were talking about with beauty [earlier]. There’s something so intimate in a way that I can’t even explain. And I like that I can’t explain it. But it’s funny because I’m going to have a book of my works [coming out] in one month, and when they asked me about the title, I just said, “Something Is Going On.” (laughter) That’s it. Because I knew Andre (Lepecki) a lot because I was living in Portugal for four or five years, and I mean . . . I love this theoretical thing, but in a way, it’s a specific job.

John: And it’s not the artist’s job.

Christian: No, it’s absolutely not my job. And I like when sometimes people say something and I say, “Oh! I have found a way (a commonality, an understanding),” but I’m not very involved in it. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas about it. Like, for example, this idea of “non-danse,” I have my own ideas about that. I remember when the journalists wrote in ’76 that some bands were performing as “punk people.” Nobody said then, “I’m punk.” It’s the people 10 years after who decided to be. So perhaps we can just have t-shirts that say, like, “Non-Danse.”

(laughter)

John: Yeah, but I mean, it gets back to our question about fashion because something can’t be “in fashion” unless you give it a name, or at least a grouping.

Christian: I always have this question: Am I a part of a certain group? Do I need to be in this certain group? Did someone sort of put me in this certain group that almost I don’t even know that I am in it? And for me it’s also connected with the power. So even if I am a critic, I’m not going to talk about what I call “célibataire experience, célibataire projects.” Single projects. We cannot deal with the market with that.

John: Yes, we’re stuck in a power structure that is absolutely about grouping into hierarchy … even in the political structure of artistic discourse.

Christian: Yeah, like some years ago I started to get a little bit angry because we started to have so many colloques . . . symposiums. And I say, “It’s very interesting, but I would prefer so much that we could show works of artists.” We have more symposiums than creation.

John: Yeah, a lot more discussion about art than the creation of actual art.

Christian: Yeah, and I know that for it’s important for some people, and also for me, it’s important. We can spend hours and days to talk about everything, but if you cannot face the reality of dance . . . I remember, especially in France, you can be invited by a theater to be in a symposium that would never invite you to show your work. I’m fed-up with that. I like that discourse as a real practice. I could stay with you here all day long to talk about everything. I love that. I love that. But, in a way, there has to be a balance.

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