A lecture/performance about the Ballet Frankfurt company, under the direction of William Forsythe? Why wait! – wondered Frankfurt dancer and choreographer Tony Rizzi. Tony Rizzi trained at Boston Ballet School for 4 years before joining the Ballet Frankfurt in 1985 where he became one of the Forsythe’s main dancers/collaborators and in the process, helped to redefine ballet.

This lecture/performance is a way for Rizzi to share his experience, to get a more deeper understanding of the very wide range of works that Forsythe and company created that led to its world wide fame. But, more importantly, the performances examines the radical shifts in how a ballet company could function, which was ahead of its time, and how it led to produce such wonderful results.

He brings with him one of his former colleagues, Irene Klein, a long-time member of the company. They come together to tell stories and to reflect on the key impulses that contributed to the creation of the uniqueness, magic and myth of Forsythe and the company. Rizzi and his company, “The Bad Habits,” interweave stage performance and videos from archival video footage of the company to create a “live documentation” that provides an insight into the special, almost mysterious emergence of art, in which clarity and chaos, reality and fantasy, theories and ideas simply merge.

Antony Rizzi was longtime dancer of Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt as well as main protagonists of the Belgian avant garde artist Jan Fabre. He has been creating work since 1988 where one of his first works, created at age 23, Cockroach Nightmare, for Boston Ballet 2 was voted one of the ten best dance performances of that year in the Boston Herald. From his first work back then to today with his company in Frankfurt Germany, The Bad Habits, the company has been fearless in touching on taboo subjects in dance, being on the forefront of radical theater and dance. The work has toured internationally and prefers to stay small scale where intimacy is a big part of the show as the great performance artist Penny Arcade taught him. The audience IS the show. The company motto is: Art is a dirty job but someone has to do it.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/before-during-after-working-with-william-forsythe-tickets-429932388347

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