thursday 4 april – 7 pm
friday 5 april – 7 pm
P420 Gallery
Michele Rizzo (I/NL)
Spacewalk
performance, italian première
Spacewalk invites into an abstract structure of possibilities and drops us in places where movement continues behind closed eyelids. The development of technology and the evolution of our imaginations are administering stress tests to the material world. This is leading to new ideas and visions of infinity. We have learned to escape reality – but also to reinforce it. As a result, we have started to see the space around us as a receiver of our own representations, imaginings and images. Michele Rizzo is making an attempt to make this understanding of space visible. Looking for the invisible in the visible and the virtual in the material.
Michele Rizzo, italian choreographer based in Amsterdam, graduated in 2011 at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam (SNDO), where he is now a guest teacher in choreography and movement research, and in 2015 at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam in the Dirty Art Department Master program for visual arts. His research operates at the crossover between performance and visual art, and produces performances with high visual impact, that merge sculpture, dance and theatre elements. Although all his works are united by a distinctive interest into the poetics of transformation, becoming and transcending, the outcomes of such multidisciplinary approach often crystallize in very different performances. His productions are: HIGHER (2015), a project inspired by club culture with music by Lorenzo Senni, focused on the experience of ecstatic dancing, as during the activity of clubbing. The performativity developed in the research looked at trance as a state that allows a sculptural shaping of the dancing body-mind. The latest edition of this work, titled HIGHER xtn (2019), is an extended version with 14 dancers created for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, as part of the exhibition Freedom of Movement. SPACEWALK (2017) deals still with notions of clubbing and trance, but as well transcends the aesthetic of the club, translating it into a unique spatial environment, which refers to the realm of the virtual and architecture. His latest work DEPOSITION (2019) represents the third episode of the trilogy that includes HIGHER and SPACEWALK. Since 2017 he is cofounder of the choreographic platform DANSCO Amsterdam, the art and dance space Jacuzzi Amsterdam, and is as well part of GRIP.
concept & choreography Michele Rizzo
with Michele Rizzo & Valerio Sirna
stage design & light Michele Rizzo & Lukas Heistinger
sound Au†ismo
technical realisation Lukas Heistinger, Yiannis Mouravas & Diederik Schoorl
advise Juan Pablo Cámara
many thanks to Antonia Steffens and Renée Copraij