Fieldchoreography, Cristina Kristal Rizzo

Moving through the neighborhood while reading the space between inside and outside, inhabiting empty areas, glimpsing places where one can pause, and highlighting specific, particular elements. We invited the dancer, performer, and choreographer Cristina Kristal Rizzo to engage with these architectures, to explore their characteristics through the body, and to offer a choreographic interpretation of the INA-Casa neighborhood on Via del Mare.

NOTES (for an emergent choreography)

I try to imagine an initial dance that is brought into existence solely through the presence of the body.

Today, here and everywhere in the world, it is crucial to seek out and act in favor of any existing form of freedom, and to nurture it. To make space. To expand the degrees of possibility and diminish the degrees of dominance. Dance is an energetic phenomenon, a need to move without assigning meaning—an alignment with that dynamic, sensitive, and imaginative capacity of body and mind, which we call homeostasis. It is a movement of joy, it is quite literally the movement of happiness, nothing more. For this reason, humankind has always danced in some way, and all other species dance in their own ways. Dance is anarchic; it is pleasure that remains indifferent to power. Dance is undoubtedly feminine, it connects our memory to our future. We must allow it to emerge, care for its emergence, learn to create time and space for our own dance in a world that will constantly threaten to ignore or diminish it.

One afternoon, while walking along a riverbank, I saw some birds in the distance—very elegant, perhaps from the gull or flamingo family—all white, drying themselves in the sun along the river. They weren’t speaking, but they were clearly together. An ephemeral group, perhaps formed on the spot, but they were certainly dancing. I am somewhat sensitive, in the sense that I feel energies when they come to me. Perhaps we all are. In a few days, I’ll find myself having to perform, to do shows, and it feels like a completely absurd illusion. And yet, I still glimpse some flickers of magic. Maybe we all need to step out of the dream of self-assertion, and simply be bodies. I imagine a collective action taking place at the same moment, in different locations, simultaneously inhabiting these streets and these rooftops.

Meanwhile, I came across this: “In 1971, Trisha Brown created Roof Piece: eleven performers danced on the rooftops of Soho, New York, each separated by a block, distant but still within visual contact. The audience also watched from rooftops, gathered in small groups, while life continued below on the streets—indifferent to the performance—in what contemporary accounts described as a ghost town, emptied of people due to post-industrialization and urban violence. Roof Piece was both a dance and an unprecedented way of inhabiting the city, a new way of seeing it.” I found out that in 2011, the Iranian artist Anahita Razmi recreated Roof Piece in Tehran, a city where dance and any artistic performance that does not conform to the norms of the Islamic regime are forbidden. The choreography in Tehran was performed by local artists, who created a new version of the piece under the city’s restrictive conditions. No audience could witness the performance. I’ll be alone, but I can try to transmit my dance telepathically!

Finally, I pause to reflect on these notes by Aby Warburg from Fragments on Expression: April 1, 1888, Hamburg, night. The forms through which the body can fulfill an action are infinitely diverse. November 14, 1891. The love of the living and the particular is what drives us forward. 1892. What is mobile consists of losing oneself in the detail, in the new. A forward movement that persists in detail. What is stable consists of contemplating the detail, calming oneself with a soft sigh. Scattered pieces at rest… The moment we distance ourselves from things, the moment we create space, we think—I. The moment we unite, the moment we are absorbed, we are matter—nothing. Half space and half matter—art.

Fieldchoreography, INA-Casa Via del Mare.

Cristina Kristal Rizzo

Project carried out with the contribution of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, Regione Puglia, Fund for the financing of projects and activities of general interest in the Third Sector (Articles 72 and 73 of Legislative Decree No. 117/2017) – PugliaCapitaleSociale 3.0 Notice.

Cristina Kristal Rizzo Fieldchoreography 04.20.2024

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Cristina Kristal Rizzo

Fieldchoreography

04.20.2024