TOT

Michele Rizzo (Italy) - Reaching

For Italian choreographer Michele Rizzo, the club is the place where time and space, day and night, merge. The shared experience in the club, of bodies becoming one with the exhilarating music, offers a new sense of rituals lived together. It is not without reason that Berlin's infamous nightclub, Berghain, is referred to by many as ‘the church’.

Rizzo has already translated the intoxicating energy of a rave party aesthetically and choreographically in his dance piece HIGHER (2015) and HIGHER xtn. (2018) for the Stedelijk Museum, which was adapted to the museum's location. Both pieces were a reflection on the history of dance, which has always been closely linked to religious rituals; after all, in various cultures dance is seen as a way of achieving transcendence. Rest (2020) will be followed by REACHING (2021), the third part of the trilogy in which Rizzo approaches dance and movement from the perspective of rave culture.

Rizzo developed the dance piece when the world had already been in the grip of the pandemic for some time, with all the social restrictions that went with it. REACHING has thus acquired an extra charge. Fourteen performers celebrate who they are: moving bodies, fundamentally alone, but connected in the desire to merge.

The soundscape by Belgian composer and performance artist Billy Bultheel, increasingly louder in rhythm, is the driving force of the piece. The dancers approach each other cautiously at first, but gradually develop common dynamics. The pace of their movements quickens almost imperceptibly, moving from gentle steps to a climax. This transition from rest to upward power, from solitude to togetherness, makes tangible the longing for things that we may not be able to fully understand, but that define our humanity.

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