Tony Rizzi: Angels in the audience

“Death is not the end” insists Tony Rizzi, the Boston-born, Frankfurt-based dance theatremaker. The former principal dancer in Frankfurt Ballet set out to create his latest work, Shows You (maybe) Missed, as a kind of personal dance canon, including work from legends of contemporary dance like Pina Bausch, Jan Fabre and his mentor, William Forsythe, that he planned to recreate on stage. What Rizzi discovered, however, was that the shows he chose were pieces that his father (who died in 2017) and his brother (who passed earlier this year) were never able to see. The self-described “witch” sat down with The Berliner to talk about artmaking as an opening up to irrational forces.

How do you see yourself acting as a conduit in the creation of Shows You (maybe) Missed?

I told Billy Forsythe about this Pina Bausch show that I saw – the second-to-last piece from Pina. It was a piece that she created for all the older people that had worked with her forever, and one younger dancer. I was telling Billy all about seeing the show again, about these three scenes that were connected and how beautiful it was. And he said to me, “You should do a whole show where you just describe performances.”

So that’s how I first started, and I thought I would describe or recreate performances. At first, I thought it was for people in Frankfurt that never saw some of these pieces. And then I slowly realised that every piece I was picking out subconsciously was somehow connected with death. I realised, oh my God, I’m making this show for my dad. These are all the shows he didn’t see. And then my brother passed away, and he also would travel the world to see me perform. So I thought, I’ll add him, because he came to me in the spirit of wind. I use that in the show – wind – which Pina Bausch also uses at the ending of Sweet Mambo. It’s all wind.

Did you feel that you were mourning in the process of creating this piece?

It was mourning only at the end. I just do the craft and then it slowly appears what it is about.

Do you think that mourning entering the piece has something to do with the mortality of live performance – how like us, it is fleeting? You perform and then it’s over…

I have to trust that the universe is going to guide this performance.

I think that in live performance, you’re being guided if your channels are open. It’s a scary place. Like with Pina Bausch, her first big dance theatre piece was called Fritz, and she hated it. She was pissed off – she realised that it sucked, because everything was calculated before: it’s going to be a duet for that, and that’s going to go there, and then that’s going to happen after. And that’s going to happen after. There was no room for flexibility. She realised [you’ve] got to go into the scary place where [you] don’t know what the fuck it’s going to be. I have to trust that the universe is going to guide this performance.

That sounds a little bit like the idea with which you began – that death is not the end. That out of the void, out of the truly unknown, emerges something alive…

Exactly! My last performance with Ballet Frankfurt was the second act of Eidos: Telos. It’s this big waltz. It’s the land of the dead. And the main character speaks Italian to me. And I turned it into a Broadway song. The curtain’s slowly coming down. It’s the last performance of the company. It’s closing. And just when it got down here, she said something to me and I said, “This looks like a job for me. So everybody just follow me. Because it’s gonna feel so empty without me.” Boom. I quoted the Eminem song. It just came to my mind. It was like, “Did you plan that?” I was like, “No, it was in the moment.” Suddenly it was like, “That’s what you need to say now.”