Out Of Step

Multidisciplinary, charismatic and challenging, French choreographer Christian Rizzo is the poster boy for 21st-century dance, making waves with his experimental performances

- Annie Darling

Christian Rizzo is a nonconformist. Grizzled and lowkey in an oversized, distressed denim jacket worn with cropped trackies and tennis socks, the charismatic French choreographer has a distinct style that complements his eccentric personality. Born in Cannes in 1965, his formative years were spent surrounded by the countercultural and revolutionary changes of the 1970s. It was a time defined by a need for realism and escapism. Pie-in-the-sky thinking was laughed off as the utopian values of the Swinging Sixties fell by the wayside. Everything was punk and glitter, grit and glamour, and Rizzo was embracing the fantasy of individualism through dance even back then.

“They were fun and high-spirited decades that were full of energy,” he recalls, and music—music to which Rizzo spent his adolescence dancing in sticky-floored nightclubs. The genres didn’t matter, he says, and varied from rock and soul to disco and electro. His cousin was a ballerina, but he had never wanted to perform professionally—an unusual trait for a choreographer, but there’s not much that’s conventional about Rizzo.