directing
° In June 2016 Cristiano organised “Gala per Alessia” in his hometown to rise funds for the charity Casa Alessia, busy in building schools, orphanages and hospitals in Burundi, India and Ecuador. He performed next to 11 dancers that he recruited from Dutch National Ballet, Wiener Staatsballett and La Scala Ballet. Cristiano also personally chose the program of the show and planned flights, royalties requests for music and choreography, lights, costumes, tech issues and so on…
° In August 2016 he took part to the four days long Young Rural Retreat at Dance East in Ipswich (UK), event born years ago to gather existing and aspiring ballet directors (in the past it was attended by Ted Brandsen, Ernst Meisner, Tamara Rojo, Paul Lightfoot, Monica Mason, Kevin McKenzie, Wayne Eagling and many more). The 2016 edition was held by Scottish Ballet’s director Christopher Hampson and their education department's coordinator Katherine Cassidy. The event was structured in interactive parts (debate simulations) for practicing talking and organizational skills and also in several speech parts held by many current directors (about creating and leading companies).
° He took part to HNB’s New Moves 2017, 2018 and 2019 not only as dancer and choreographer, but also as general coordinator.
His main task was to decide the order of the show depending on length and type of choreographies, cast (giving dancers enough time for costume changes) and technical changes (floor, backdrop). He also was a mediator between choreographers and various departments such as
- board (he set meetings between choreographers and direction)
- music (collected all tracks for sound quality check and music rights, planned meeting for choreographers’ audio editing)
- marketing (helped with the campaign of the show and organised the meet and greet with donors and choreographers)
- tickets (he discussed the free-tickets policy for the crew)
- costumes (helped the costume department planning choreographer's trips to the atelier and organized costume studio run-throughs)
- photography (found a photographer who took pictures of the show and program book)
- booklet (collected and provided info of every piece for the booklet like name of the piece, names of dancers, music…)
- tech (planned all stage calls and meetings of choreographers with light designer + stage manager for light and props)
- schedule (checked HNB studios availability and created the online link for them to be booked by choreographers)
- after party (helped planning the after party - location, DJs, deciding number of free drinks for guests and crew…).
° In 2017 and 2019 Dutch National Ballet hosted the Conference Positioning Ballet, which Cristiano and many other dancers from the company managed to attend, even if not in its entirety, according to their work schedule.
Positioning Ballet gathered 40 ballet directors plus 80 more people from the ballet community (dancers, choreographers, journalists) to address what kind of leadership is required for artistic directors nowadays. Main theme of the event was to discuss and challenge the relevance that an art form from the 17th century like ballet can have on an audience from the 21st one.
The conversation was structured around the three main key points of identity and heritage (old repertoire, new works, companies' style), society (working culture in ballet, social medias' impact on the art form) and diversity (reform culture of ballet).
° Over 2022, 2023 and 2024 Cristiano was one of the Representitives of Estonian National Ballet, a sort of trade unionist figure that most ballet companies have in order to facilitate the communication between the dancers and the direction.
Throughout the years in this position he perfected several skills such as organising and leading company meetings, speaking in public, summarizing and drawing up written reports in an objective and unbiased way, problem solving, facilitating the communications between different positions and departments in the Opera House etc.
Mostly, his task was to help creating better working conditions for the company on a variety of different levels (better salaries, higher performance pay, reminding marketing of dancer's upcoming premieres for them to be photographed, finding a platform for anonymous company polls and surveys, massages and physio spots after working hours, investigating and improving pointe shoes budget and so on...).
° From the second half of 2023, Cristiano started choreographing and directing the production Cinderella, which is set to premiere on March 5th 2024 on the main stage of Estonian National Opera and to then tour the Baltic countries for the rest of the year.
Cinderella is a full length two acts ballet that will be performed by dancers from five different international ballet companies (Paris Opera Ballet, Madrid's Compañía Nacional de Danza, Dutch National Ballet, Finnish National Ballet and Estonian National Ballet).
Besides the work as choreographer, Cristiano was personally responsible for several management tasks like contacting each company's artistic director to investigate the dancers' availability and also to organise everyone's travels and accommodations both for rehearsals and performances.
Cristiano curated the entire dramaturgy of the evening (scene by scene sequence and storyline, costumes and set quick changes, music score cut to bring the three acts production down to just two parts) and he was also very much involved in the process of designing costumes, props, sets and projections.
° Since 2016, Cristiano has been often teaching young students in his home town, Novara.
He taught classical ballet class as well as few neoclassical workshops.
° Throughout many years of choreographing, Cristiano was also responsible for teaching the ballet steps and coaching the dancers towards their performances in a variety of different conditions and with dancers of various levels and styles (female coaching, male coaching, pointe shoe work, socks, partnering, short studio time and imminent deadlines, professional dancers, principal and soloist dancers, school students...).
Cristiano always strives for an uplifting and inspiring working environment where there is space for hard work, perfectionism and attention to details, as well as for a supportive and constructive attitude, human respect and plenty of artistic freedom for the performers to reconnect with their own most authentic way of dancing and personality.