Ou pas

Chorégraphie de Christian RizzoEspace lumineux: Cathy Olive Performeurs: les danseurs du Ballet National de Marseille

Vernissage of the installation 2014/3/19 Tour Panorama I la Friche Belle de Mai

Whether hanging loose without a dancer to wear them or hampering movement, costumes have often been a constituent part of Christian Rizzo’s work. His approach to clothing has attracted the interest of couture houses, even though the choreographer specifies that “from the moment fashion enters a theatre, it becomes a costume”.
For Spring at the BNM, the choreographer and his associate, Caty Olive, for whom light is a form of writing for the stage, have devised a installation out of some of the 3,500 items that have dressed the company’s stars since the days of Roland Petit. However it is not about an inventory of gestures that have disappeared: in Ou Pas the dancers are invited to an introspective abandonment, carried by the enigmatic encounter between history-laden costumes and their contemporary presence.

“This installation, perfected with his partner Caty Olive, allows Christian Rizzo to continue his research. “I’ve worked a lot in fashion and I wanted to see it in a different way,” explains the multifaceted creator. The choreographer has therefore devised a strange playground for dancers out of these coloured archives, these relics of fabric. You may be surprised by their presence or not… hence the title of the exhibition. Dance is always possible in this production, in the midst of the 3,500 clothes forming a plinth. Christian Rizzo wanted this work to be like a “suspended present”. All he does is evoke these costumes and what they take along with them, “codes of ballet as anyone who doesn’t know them might imagine them to be”. Having become a material like any other, this mass is spread out like a luminous, smoke-filled landscape. “The dancers can be moving and when people come, maybe nothing happens. It’s like an encounter that isn’t premeditated; it’s very beautiful,” explains the contemplative Christian Rizzo.