After studying in New York, at the Merce Cunningham Studio and with Trisha Brown, Cristina Kristal Rizzo 'daughter' of the American post-modern, started her own activity as a performer and dance-maker in Florence. Founder of the historical group of the Italian avant-garde of the nineties Kinkaleri, she has taken an independent path of production and experimentation since 2008. There has been a succession of performative projects in unconventional places and wide-ranging choreographic works such as the successful diptych VN Serenade on Schönberg's Transfigured Night and Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C major, co-produced by the LAC of Lugano.
Rizzo is a soloist whose presence on stage is magnetic, with her name finding a place of honor in the reinterpretation of historical solos such as the legendary Dying Swan performed by Pavlova, that she has transformed into Invisible Piece, or in the interpretation, again as a solo, of highly symbolic scores such as the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.
Her latest collective project investigates the bodily practice of 'touching/touching others', and is not meant as an exploration of contact improvisation, a technique born in the USA in the seventies that Rizzo knows well, but rather as the expressive, emotional and intimate potential of action. Covid, with its restrictive regulations, then changed the evolution of the project. In Echoes danze trasparenti "the material - explains Cristina Rizzo - probes the possible relationship with the invisible, the void". "The health emergency forced me to approach the theme of touching from another point of view. Between the physical and the symbolic, touching the other means touching all possible others, including one's own person, it means transferring the gesture of touching into the dance".
Therefore, these new danze trasparenti, conceived for MART’s Giardino delle Statue take shape from the impasse caused by of the lack of touch, from the simplicity of breathing, from its filling and emptying, its rising and falling, "this garden” - comments the choreographer – is itself a place connoted as a container of other dances ". In the natural light of dusk, performing on the grass, the dancers' bodies (including Cristina Rizzo) will attempt to render material the idea of touch through symbolic physicality, which nevertheless borders on the evanescent.