Tony Rizzi & The Bad Habits
Why Wait?
Ballett Frankfurt under the direction of William Forsythe – a legend. The dancer and choreographer Tony Rizzi, himself a prominent member of the company for many years, brought together former colleagues and a dancer from the younger generation for his lecture performance in order to revitalize in a retrospect the special atmosphere of working with Forsythe. It is a remembrance of the genius, the chaos, the creativity, the craziness of a special epoch, which still has an influence on dance. When Rizzi & Company interweave the live stage performance with videos from the archive of Ballett Frankfurt, a wild ride is created that constantly oscillates between back then and now. Far from kitsch and romanticization, he still awakes with a nostalgic gleam the longing for a past time. When after the Covid intermission the long-expected piece finally celebrated its world premiere, the press and audiences praised the anarchy, the alleged chaotic rehearsals, and Forsythe's creativity.
Tony Rizzi received his training at Boston Ballet School before he came to Ballett Frankfurt in 1985, where over the next two decades he became one of William Forsythe's most important dancers and later his artistic advisor.
With Why Wait?, Rizzi is once again a guest at DANCE in Munich, following his performance in 2012 of An attempt to fail at ground breaking theatre with Pina Arcade Smith. This puts him in the group of prominent ex-Forsythe dancers who regularly have shown their own choreographies at DANCE, such as Richard Siegal, Nicole Peisl, and Crystal Pite, and it is a follow-up on the guest performance of William Forsythe's A Quiet Evening of Dance at DANCE 2019.
The guest performance will be accompanied by an exhibition with black-and-white photographs by Tony Rizzi, which he took of Ballet Frankfurt in the 1980s and 90s.
Why Wait? belongs, together with An Evening with Raimund and Hypnogirl 23 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster to the productions at DANCE that deal with important dance artists and dance history.
More about Why Wait? in the Magazine
Sunday, May 14, 6 p.m.
Monday, May 15, 7 p.m. + Artist Talk
Duration: 90 min
barrier-free
Direction, Film, Music: Tony Rizzi
Performers: Tony Rizzi, Richard Obersheven, Irene Klein, Alan Barnes, Yoko Tani, Alessandro Costagliogla
A co-production by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and Hessisches Staatsballett as part of Tanzplattform Rhein-Main 2021
Funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt/Main, the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art and by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media in the program NEUSTART KULTUR, [auxiliary program tanz:digital] of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
Supported by NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ Gastspielförderung Tanz, funded by the Representative of the federal government for culture and media as well as the culture and art ministries of the federal states.
Special thanks Sylvia and Friedrich von Metzler for the financial support of the research and production
