At On the Boards: Rizzo captures Washington in a heady, multimedia road trip

The last production by French choreographer-director Christian Rizzo seen in Seattle, "b.c, janvier 1545, fontainebleau," followed an exceedingly dreamlike logic at a dreamlike pace.

His newest piece, "N?o-fiction," which had its world premiere at On the Boards on Friday, goes well beyond the dreamlike and into a swooning, woozy West Coast trance.

The multimedia production (video, movement, live music) was commissioned by OtB and created in Washington state during a 21-day residency over the summer.

Rizzo, with filmmaker Sophie Laly, embarked on a 480-mile roadtrip from east of the Cascades to the Pacific. They shot 23 hours of footage, but 98 percent of must have ended up on the cutting-room floor ? for the video component of "N?o-fiction" is as spare as it can be.

It doesn't so much depict a landscape as distill a few tonic visual notes from it, as it unfolds on a small widescreen monitor on the right and two big screens ? one square, one a narrow portrait shape ? that face the audience. The widescreen monitor (projected backwards) loops endlessly along a tree-lined coastal road where the sights are sometimes misty, sometimes clear ... and always overcast.

The bigger screens seem as still as paintings, until gradual transformations take them over. A patina of fog turns to a tangle of branches. A stylized black sun over a peculiarly colored horizon stealthily inverts itself until it becomes a full moon over a rolling Eastern Washington landscape.

Rizzo himself supplies the live action, which starts on a minimalist note and slowly builds in complication. His moves (they aren't exactly dance) unfold on a featureless rectangular mat: three paces forward, one step back, a turn, another step forward ... that's all there is to them at first.

Then he takes the action to the floor. He kneels on it; he lies on it; he rolls on it. He folds or splays his limbs along a diagonal path, as though following private geometrical instructions that only he can hear. Slow-motion tumbling comes into the picture, along with some exquisitely controlled balancing. Stage props, fetched on Rizzo's casual wanders offstage, start cropping up too. And then those stage props begin to interact or connect with images that appear on the two big video monitors.

Accompanying all this is Lori Goldston's original cello score: a mix of meditative pizzicato and steadily bowed drones that seem to mirror the ever-unspooling roadtrip images on the smaller monitor to her right.

At just under an hour, "N?o-fiction" casts a certain spell. It also may lull you till you drift right off. Its creators dub it "expanded cinema" and see it as a way to "re-envision filmic language to include what is around the picture frame as well as what is inside it."

That describes the parameters of the piece. But the same could be said of a much more frantic video/music/live-action mix. What distinguishes "N?o-fiction" is the way it slows down your perceptions and metes out just enough content over just enough time to feel full but never busy.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

Source: http://feeds.seattletimes.com/click.phdo?i=5714f9cc5475cea9409599f5d6c4f867

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