Kitchen Cooking

Sending an audience through a ritual of repetition requires a director confident in his vision and possessed of a keen eye for detail. Happily, Christian Rizzo is this kind of director. His 2007 dance piece, b.c., janvier 1545, fontainebleu, was presented last month at the Kitchen in New York City.

The work is ostensibly a solo for former Lyon Opera Ballet dancer Julie Guibert. She is motivated within the piece, however, by a non-human figure, played by a man in a bunny mask. Together they act out a predictable hour- long ritual of movement in a temple of flickering light and harsh sound. Even when (or perhaps because) it becomes predictable, fontainbleu offers the audience a meditation.