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DRESS FOR SUCCESS I-Fang Lin performs Sujets à Vif

Photograph: Christian Rizzo

For his long-awaited New York debut as part of the Crossing the Line festival, Christian Rizzo, a French artist with a decidedly versatile approach, is not holding back. At the Center for Performance Research, a new Williamsburg space run by artists Jonah Bokaer and John Jasperse, Rizzo will present three projects. Sujets à Vif is a solo for I-Fang Lin, who selected Rizzo as part of a program presented at the Avignon festival in which dancers choose choreographers. 100% Polyester is essentially a dance without dancers, and Fantômes et vanités n°4 is a cinematic self-portrait in which Rizzo never appears. “I thought it was a good opportunity to reach me from different angles,” he says, laughing, in a phone interview from France. “I like this idea because I’m not one way. I think it’s to show that I’m an artist trying to grab the right medium when I want to do something. It’s not because I am a dancer that when I have an idea, I always do it through dance. It’s more the question of choosing a medium when I have a desire.”

Rizzo, 43, took a circuitous route to dance, starting out as a rock musician and fashion designer. For Lili Chopra, the French Institute Alliance Française’s vice president of cultural affairs and cocurator of Crossing the Line, “it is all these facets from his multiple backgrounds that bring so many layers to his work.” And while Rizzo may have started studying dance on the late side—by his estimation, he was well into his twenties—he recalls dancing all the time as a child and being a big clubber for years. “I started really by chance: I went with a friend to an audition, and Mathilde Monnier was doing the choreography,” Rizzo recalls. “She asked me to join her company. It is funny because when I think about that now, it was totally normal for me. I was not questioning dance as a practice, but more as a space. Finally, I had the feeling that I found my right space. All the thingsI was doing finally got connected in dance.”

Even though he created 100% Polyester ten years ago, he now regards the installation, which features two dresses connected at the sleeves and some carefully placed fans, as an artistic manifesto. Nothing much happens; the conjoined dresses move as if placed in front of a curtain on a windy day, performing a spooky sort of phantom dance. But the piece raises a question—how does one talk about dance when there are no dancers?—that is somewhat related to an issue Rizzo addresses in all of his work: “It has to do with this idea of presence, with or without movement,” he explains.

This, in turn, ties into Rizzo’s obsession with time. “I’m very afraid of speed,” he continues. “I have the feeling that, more and more, we are not using our eyes—we are just grabbing images and not really looking at things. I am trying just to give people the opportunity to be more connected with their own imagination. It’s kind of political.”

Unlike his contemporaries in France, whose choreographic investigations have largely dealt with the body itself, eschewing theatrics in favor of a starker setting, Rizzo has never shied from lighting and flamboyant costumes; he understands and appreciates the theater. But Sujets à Vif, in which Lin moves very slowly, speaking Chinese, illustrates a gradual change in his work. “Before, my provocation was really more about how to create a space to show a body,” he says. “Now I think I focus more on the body and how this body, when it’s moving, creates the space around it. It’s not that I’m less interested in light and designing and costumes, but I want to be more focused on what the body can create.”

Born in Taiwan, Lin now lives in France and performs with Monnier’s company in Montpellier; consequently, Rizzo is familiar with her way of moving. “When we started to work, it was really clear that this idea of a solo had to do with, How can we present someone just alone onstage?” he recalls. “So we work on finding a connection between the language that nobody understands, not even me, and the body. In a way, it’s a very simple solo.”

And then, there is food, which is one of the ways Rizzo connected with Lin in the first place. At one point, after he knew he would be working in Taiwan, he asked her to recommend a place to take cooking lessons (something he likes to do wherever his travels take him). She replied with a request: that he make a solo for her. For Rizzo, who will also participate in “Food Futures”—a Crossing the Line forum about the art of cuisine, featuring Julie Andrieu, Wylie Dufresne and David Zuddas—cooking isn’t just a side pleasure; it’s intrinsically linked to the way he views the most ephemeral of art forms. “When I’m working, I am always saying that I am cooking,” he says. “I like the idea of food because it is a dance also. You are working, you are showing, but after, it disappears and you are just working on the memory. Nothing stays that you can touch or buy or have at home; the only thing is the memory. “

Christian Rizzo performs at the Center for Performance Research Thu 25–Sat 27.