

DIRECTING
° In June 2016, Cristiano organised the event “Gala per Alessia” in Novara (IT) to raise funds for Casa Alessia, a charitable organisation devoted to building schools, orphanages and hospitals in Burundi, India and Ecuador.
He performed next to eleven dancers that he recruited from Dutch National Ballet, Wiener Staatsballett and La Scala.
Cristiano also personally curated the program of the show and arranged flights, royalties requests for music and choreography, lights, costumes et cetera.
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° In August 2016, he joined the four days long Young Rural Retreat at Dance East in Ipswich (UK), event born several 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 and Wayne Eagling among others).
The 2016 edition was held by Scottish Ballet’s leaders Christopher Hampson (artistic director) and Katherine Cassidy (cultural engagement director).
The event included both interactive parts (debate simulations for practicing public talking and organizational skills) as well as theorical ones: numerous current dance directors were invited to give very interesting speeches about their experiences in creating and leading companies.
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° He was involved in Dutch National Ballet’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 (providing enough time for costume changes) and technical changes (floor, backdrop). He also was a mediator between choreographers and all various departments such as:
- board (set choreographers' meetings with the director)
- 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 the donors)
- tickets (he discussed the free-tickets policy for the crew)
- costumes (helped the costume department plan choreographer's trips to the atelier and organized costume studio run-throughs)
- photography (found a photographer who took pictures of the show and for program book)
- booklet (collected and provided info of every piece for the booklet, as title of the piece, names of dancers, music...)
- tech (planned all the stage rehearsals and the meetings between choreographers, light designer and stage manager for light and props)
- schedule (checked DNB studios’ availability and created the online link for them to be booked by the choreographers)
- after party (helped planning the after party - location, DJs, deciding number of free drinks for guests and crew).
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° 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. The main goal 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.
The conversation was structured around the three main key points of identity and heritage (companies' style, new works, old repertoire), society (working culture in ballet, social medias' impact on dance) and diversity (reform ballet culture).
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° 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 usually have in order to facilitate the communication between the dancers and the direction.
During the years in this position, he perfected skills such as organising and leading company meetings, speaking in public, summarizing and drawing up written reports in an objective and unbiased way, facilitating the communication between different positions and departments, problem-solving.
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, introducing massage and physiotherapy spots after working hours, improving pointe shoes’ budget and more).
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° From late 2023, Cristiano started choreographing and directing the production Cinderella, a full length ballet privately produced by Estonian Ballet Agency which premiered on March 5th 2024 on the main stage of the Estonian National Opera and then toured the Baltic countries during 2024 and 2025.
Cinderella is a two acts ballet that always showcases a different cast: in every performance the dancers are recruited from at least three different leading European ballet companies and so far the production has involved artists from ten different cities (Paris Opera Ballet, Madrid's Compañía Nacional de Danza, Royal Danish Ballet, Vanemuine Ballet, Balletto di Milano as well as Dutch, Finnish, Estonian, Polish and Hungarian national ballet companies).
Besides being the choreographer, Cristiano was also personally responsible for several managing tasks as for example contacting each company's artistic director to investigate the dancers' availability and organising everyone's travels and accommodations for both rehearsals and shows.
Cristiano curated the entire dramaturgy of the evening (scene by scene sequence and storyline, costumes and set quick changes, music score cuts to bring the original three acts production down to two parts) and he was also involved in the process of designing costumes, props, sets and projections.
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° Since August 2023, Cristiano became one of the members of the Estonian Ballet Union’s Council. The Ballet Union is a government-subsidized artistic association which holds a crucial spot in the Estonian ballet scene: it provides its members, in exchange for a small monthly contribution, of great financial support for all activities that can contribute to the dancers' artistic and athletic growth (gym membership, refund for attending master classes and workshops, covering the cost of tickets to theatre performances and museums, support for medical expenses and more).
The Union’s function is also to facilitate the communication between the local ballet companies and the government.

Teaching
​° Since 2016, Cristiano has often been teaching young students in his home town, Novara (both ballet class and neoclassical workshops).
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° Throughout over a decade of choreography, Cristiano was also responsible for staging his own works (teaching the ballet steps) and coaching the artists 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 dancers and soloists, dance students...).
Cristiano always strives for an uplifting and inspiring work 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 artistic freedom for the dancers to reconnect with their most authentic way of dancing.
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° As discussed above, even if officially working as a choreographer, Cristiano got to simultaneously cover the position of coach and rehearsal director when he attended Dutch National Ballet's Choreographic Academy (in this case working with the members of the Junior Company), as well as when he created a piece for the final shows of Summer Ballet Estonia (a three weeks workshop attended by students from world-famous professional ballet schools).
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° Cristiano has also been a jury member twice, alongside established teachers and former performers from the Italian and Estonian scene (RossoLab competition, Miss Estonia).