> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://spotlight.adancemag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Rebuilding the Bridge: How Sara Pizzi Redefines Legibility in Dance - URL: https://spotlight.adancemag.com/sara-pizzi-redefines-legibility-in-dance/ - Published: 2026-09-22T13:15:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T13:15:18.000Z - Description: Tracing the thread from Blocks to Just Keep Waiting, Italian-born choreographer Sara Pizzi explains why the best contemporary art leaves room for multiple perspectives. - Author: a Dance Mag - Tags: Profiles, Features > "I used to think building a bridge meant making contemporary dance understandable. Now I think it can also mean giving someone a way into an experience without requiring them to arrive at the same answer." – Sara Pizzi In December 2020, [Sara Pizzi](https://sarapizzi.com/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com) and her creative partner Aika Takeshima came home from a shopping trip in Brooklyn with a pair of painted wooden blocks. New York's theaters were dark, Sara's performance calendar had been wiped clean for months, and neither of them had anywhere left to dance. They built something out of the blocks instead, stacking them, taking the structure apart, building it again, filming the whole process for an audience that existed only online. They called the piece [*Blocks*](https://saraikacreation.com/works-blocks/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com). Sara describes that period as a period that taught her how she wants to work. "When everything disappears, you can still create from what remains. My calendar was erased, my work disappeared, and I had to rebuild my artistic identity and career from the ground up," she says. In January 2022, she and Aika premiered [*L Train*](https://saraikacreation.com/kickstarter/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com), a piece drawn from watching strangers on the Brooklyn subway line fall into formation with each other and scatter, replaced by other strangers heading somewhere else. The piece returned that April in a revised version and again that October with an actor added to the cast. When we ask whether that counts as restlessness, Sara pushes back on the word. "I don't think I see a work as something that becomes finished and then has to be protected from change," she says. "Maybe that can look like restlessness from the outside, but for me it's more about curiosity." > "I don't think rebuilding necessarily means trying to recreate the original. It can mean taking the same material and discovering what it can become under different circumstances and viewpoints." – Sara Pizzi That curiosity has since taken on a new scale. Sara's newest work, [*Just Keep Waiting*](https://saraikacreation.com/just-keep-waiting/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com), was made in New York with Aika and Italian choreographer Katia Tubini, then passed to a new cast in Verona and another in Osaka. The choreography was never the same in either city. "The structure can remain, but the bodies change, the relationships change, the cultural context changes, and therefore the work changes," Sara explains. When we draw a connection between the new piece and the pandemic-era's *Blocks*, she accepts it, with a small correction. "I actually like the connection, even if I didn't consciously make it at the time. I don't think rebuilding necessarily means trying to recreate the original. It can mean taking the same material and discovering what it can become under different circumstances and viewpoints." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/52/5e5211c4-8c92-4a71-a877-197e1314ad5f/content/images/2026/09/Sara-Pizzi--photo-3.jpg) Photo by [BECCAVISION CREATIVE STUDIO](https://www.beccavisionnyc.com/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com) A few years ago, still finding her footing as a choreographer in New York, she wrote an artistic statement carrying a mission: dance needed to be legible. She wanted to build what she called a bridge, a way in for audiences who felt shut out by abstraction, who assumed art required a vocabulary they didn't have. She still holds the mission, but her sense of what the bridge is for has shifted underneath her. "There is a difference between making something understandable and making something available to experience," she says now. "I don't necessarily need the audience to leave with the interpretation I had when I created the work. I'm actually interested in leaving enough space for multiple experiences and perspectives to exist." Where her earlier work aimed to resolve an audience's confusion into understanding, [*Just Keep Waiting*](https://saraikacreation.com/just-keep-waiting/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com) is created with the intention to leave them holding something unresolved. "Maybe the bridge I was talking about years ago isn't a bridge that takes you from confusion to an answer. Maybe it's a bridge that allows you to stay connected to something you don't completely understand yet," Sara says. > "You cannot enter a room assuming that everyone needs the same thing from you. Some people need encouragement, some need space, some need clarity, and sometimes the most important thing you can do is witnessing and listening." – Sara Pizzi Her heightened sensitivity to the audience's experience was developed at an earlier job she held. Prior to her choreographic journey, Sara had worked at a mental health care center in Italy. "You cannot enter a room assuming that everyone needs the same thing from you," she says of that time. "Some people need encouragement, some need space, some need clarity, and sometimes the most important thing you can do is witnessing and listening." This attentiveness had followed her into the studio. To her, directing dancers means learning when to push someone further and when to let them hold. "I don't think care and rigor are opposites. Care means paying enough attention to someone to understand what they actually need." Her sensitivity to others carries into her collaborations. The partnership with Aika has outlasted Blocks—eventually formalizing into their joint dance company, [sarAika movement collective](https://saraikacreation.com/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com). Beyond the pandemic experiments that started it, the two have built a body of collaborative work that has appeared at Lincoln Center, Japan Society, New York Fashion Week, University Settlement, and Judson Church. Sara traces what holds the partnership together back to its roots: "We began from a relationship between two immigrant artists coming from different cultural backgrounds, and collaboration has taught me that shared authorship does not require sameness." When Katia Tubini came aboard for [*Just Keep Waiting*](https://saraikacreation.com/just-keep-waiting/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com), Sara and Aika already had years of shared authorship under their belts. Rather than inventing a new process from scratch, the piece offered a chance to see how that dynamic held up when expanded to three. Her collaborator, Katia Tubini, runs a ballet school and company in Verona built on decades of formal training. Sara and Aika came up through New York's more improvisational, self-organized dance scene, closer in spirit to the blocks than to a conservatory. When we asked where that gap showed up in the room, Sara alludes to the process of making collaboratively. "Katia, Aika, and I came into the work with different cultural and artistic histories, and that meant we didn't always read the same movement or structure in the same way. The interesting part is what happens when you have to translate between them." She doesn't name a particular disagreement, only the negotiation that took place in the room: listening carefully, re-explaining an idea until it landed differently, letting a choice change because someone else in the room saw it from another position. "Shared authorship doesn't mean making everything into a compromise. It means allowing another person's perspective to genuinely affect what the work becomes." > "Teaching constantly reminds me that dance isn't only for people who already understand dance or want to become professional dancers. I care deeply about technique and rigor, but I don't want technique to become a limitation." – Sara Pizzi Away from the studio, Sara tries to keep her private life private, avoiding the trap of turning little delightful moments into material for her own work. A good day, for her, means walking without a destination, finding somewhere to sit, having coffee, discovering a neighborhood she hasn't seen before. "I'm very aware that as an artist it's easy to turn every experience into material for work," she says. "So sometimes a good day is one where I'm not trying to make anything out of it, and usually those are the days that spark new ideas and connections." She continues to teach free community classes around Brooklyn and has worked with programs pairing kids and seniors and with dancers who have disabilities. She resists any suggestion that this work sits apart from the version of her career that plays Lincoln Center. "Teaching constantly reminds me that dance isn't only for people who already understand dance or want to become professional dancers. I care deeply about technique and rigor, but I don't want technique to become a limitation," Sara says. Lincoln Center and a community class in Bushwick, in her view, are different settings for the same underlying drive of using dance to build a connection between people who might otherwise never meet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/52/5e5211c4-8c92-4a71-a877-197e1314ad5f/content/images/2026/09/Sara-Pizzi--photo-1.png) Photo by [BECCAVISION CREATIVE STUDIO](https://www.beccavisionnyc.com/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com) By the end of a conversation with Sara, the thread running from the blocks to the subway trains to the choreography now scattered across three countries circled back to the move that started it all. "I moved from Italy to New York thinking I was building one version of my life, and the person I became here was not exactly the person I imagined when I left," she says. She used to think an artist's job was to define a voice and then defend it. That has changed. "Now I'm more interested in having a voice that can remain open enough to change," she says. It is the same claim she makes about the choreography itself, the blocks, the trains: nothing holds its shape by staying still. "I think that's where I am right now as an artist," she says. "Less interested in proving that I know the answer, and more interested in creating enough space, for myself, for the dancers, and for the audience, to keep asking." --- Find Sara on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/%5Fsarapizzi%5F/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrojXl1b6CortTwOIyKIvCA?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com), or her [website](https://sarapizzi.com/?ref=spotlight.adancemag.com).