Christian Rizzo embarked on his artistic career in Toulouse, where he formed a rock group and created a clothing brand, before studying visual arts at the Villa Arson, in Nice, and branching out somewhat unexpectedly in the direction of dance.

The 1990s sees him performing with many contemporary choreographers, as well as occasionally producing soundtracks or creating costumes. He could be seen with Mathilde Monnier, Hervé Robbe, Mark Tompkins, and participating in other art projects with Vera Mantero, Catherine Contour, Emmanuelle Huynh, and Rachid Ouramdane.

In 1996, he founded the association fragile, presenting performances, dance objects, and solo or group pieces, alternating with other projects or commissions in fashion or the visual arts. Since then, there have been more than thirty productions, not counting teaching activities.

Christian Rizzo has acted as a regular tutor in art schools in France and abroad, as well as in structures dedicated to contemporary dance. Since 2007, the association fragile/christian rizzo has been in residence at the Lille Opera.

A portrait, almost (extract)

Christian Rizzo is not a man who likes to be pigeonholed. He loves to get to grips with life: emotional and fleeting, orchestrated or improvised. Multifaceted, his approach eschews appropriation.

Economical to the point of adopting a peculiar strand of minimalism, he is above all a traveler, a lover of music and objects, enamored of the body and movement.

He is to be found wherever art intersects with the human. It is this that might be characterized as his trademark. More than a style: a way of listening, of seeing.

The eye is for him a door that must be thrown open and through which one can look in a new way. For him, the world seems to have come straight out of a laboratory of curiosities. Soft focus is as common as high definition. His processions of hybrid bodies, his march-pasts of masked figures are puzzles as well as stories of the subterranean, full of suspense and hallucination.

After manifesting an early interest in space and in the body, the choreographer has recently turned to the fresh challenge of writing. In piece after piece -- as with certain painters or visual artists -- one discerns defined periods, each work integrating moments of passage, of transition, even, of molt, which lead on to other processes that, in their turn, will be questioned in some subsequent project.

Irène Filiberti