Christian Rizzo Is Marvelous at OtB
French body artist Christian Rizzo gives two more performances of "i might as well want the blue of the sky and ride away on a donkey" at On the Boards, tonight and Saturday, May 20. Tickets, $22, are here. He's making his U.S. debut with this Seattle appearance.
The show is about an hour long, though the couple in front of us could only handle 58 minutes. The On the Boards audience tends to be friendly to the experimental, and enjoys arguing whether something was self-indulgent bullshit or perhaps a glimpse of the radically new.
We're going to hypothesize a trend that as urbanized cyberfolk become more divorced from their bodies, art will be more and more inclined to put the body, feeling, sensation, back in the spotlight, which is what Rizzo attempts. He's invitational, to an extent, opening up his studio to view -- but also playing the magician (magic being the interruption of habitual interpretation of our senses). And there might even be a three-act structure, if you're into that. Certainly things have built by the time Rizzo has got a face of green sparkle and is ranting in French about the marvelous Now like a glam-rock fascist.
If you have the patience to let the show unfold, to pay attention to what's there, we think it's rewarding, both for its audio-visual epiphanies and for afterwards, when you wonder where the breakdance moves came from. Is it dance? It's art, anyway, and it makes substantial leaps.
Rizzo opens with a balloon with what looks like BBs inside, shaking it like maracas.
Two sonographers (not in the medical sense) build an environment of sound (some of it "found" and looped -- breaths, scratches, beads dropped -- some of it electronic buzzles and fuzzicles). As sound is added or dropped, it makes us aware of visual symmetries: the expansion of the chest with a breath, a rain of plastic beads bouncing off a table with a cascade of dots of sound.
Rizzo's form of dance alternates between isolating a pose and breakdance transitions. The central part of the work sets up another symmetry, between a fox fur and a unipedal, placental, mop-headed being Rizzo creates that became so weirdly imbued with life we thought we saw it moving. His attempt to bring the fox fur to life, in a dance, was less successful, but that may have been the point.
That eerieness culminates in the final movement, when he empties green glitter out of three oversized capsules, buries his face in the pile, and adopts what some see as a rock-star persona and what struck us as a Nurembergian rant delivered in front of a microphone, complete with arm gestures. Our French is far from reliable, but we think he ended by repeating "La merveilleuse enfin" ("The marvelous at last"). Which, regarding the show, we agreed with -- it's something to marvel at.
