Born in Madrid in 1962, La Ribot is currently living in Geneva and performing internationally
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Biennale Danza di Venezia 2020
Grand Prix suisse de danse par l’Office fédéral de la culture en 2019.
Premio en Artes Plásticas de Comunidad de Madrid, España 2018.
Medalla de Oro al Merito en las Bellas Arte. España en 2015.
Premio Nacional de Danza, Ministerio de Cultura. España, 2000.
La Ribot is a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist. Her art emerged at the end of Spain’s democratic transition in the 1980s and has gone on to profoundly change the field of contemporary dance. She defies the frameworks and formats of the stage and the museum, borrowing freely from the vocabularies of theater, visual art, performance art, film, and video to achieve a conceptual shift in choreography. Her solos, collective explorations, experiments with amateurs, installations, and moving images are the many facets of a protean practice that constantly focus on the rights of the body.
© Pablo Zamora, 2019
Born in Madrid in 1962, Maria Ribot began studying classical dance in the mid-1970s. She soon became critical of the conventions of ballet and continued her education in contemporary dance in France, Germany, and the United States. She returned to Madrid in 1986 and founded Bocanada Danza with the choreographer Blanca Calvo. Her experiments of the 1980s, based in collective and transdisciplinary practices, participated in the blending of genres then flourishing in the Madrid underground, mixing dance, cabaret, free jazz, contemporary music, and the visual arts. While Spain has remained a constant intellectual and artistic anchor for La Ribot, her career has found her in a variety of environments. From 1997 to 2004, she lived in London, where her work met with acclaim in the context of live art, a notion that signaled a growing hybridization between the performing arts and performance art. Since 2004, she has lived, worked, and taught in Geneva, where she founded her company, La Ribot-Genève.
Beginning in 1989, La Ribot moved away from the collectives of Madrid to focus on radicalizing the core elements of her artistic research. She used the name La Ribot for the first time in 1991 to choreograph a deeply humorous, self-mocking dance solo that would claim a seminal place in her body of work: Soccoro! Gloria! Alone on stage, covered in multiple layers of clothing, the artist dances, acts, and performs an endless strip-tease to Beethoven’s Sonata no. 22. The deconstruction of dance codes points to the economics of show business, voyeurism, and the consumption of the artist by the audience that presides over the living ritual of theater. It opens the possibility of a conceptual reversal of these facts. From this literal baring of the bodily material of dance, La Ribot developed her Piezas distinguidas (Distinguished Pieces), of which she has to date produced five series consisting of a total of 53 dances (1993-2020). These brief solos, performed one after another over several hours without any attempt at continuity, have the poetic vigor of small forms, in which expression becomes clear and sharp. Here, the performing body is another material alongside ordinary objects reinvented with apparent lightness but distilling a silent critique of society. With great economy of means and precise dramaturgy, the artistturned space itself into a dance score, going so far as to include the audience as she made the transition from stage to white cube. Her pioneering work contributed to the conceptual approaches that began emerging from choreography in the 1990s to question the conventions of contemporary art and the social practices of museums. Yet La Ribot did not limit herself to opening dance to non-theatrical spaces. She went so far as to propose, for the first time in the field of performance, a model of intangible transaction that allows each Distinguished Piece to be acquired by a “Distinguished Proprietor.”
Since 2000, La Ribot’s dance pieces and installations have been questioning the limits of real time in the live work of art by confronting it with that of other mediums. Video recordings and live transmission circuits that allow for “long-distance” presence compress or dilate the space-time of the performance and create discomfort around representations of the body. One could say, for instance, that Despliegue (2001) squeezes the long sequence of the Distinguished Pieces into the limited space-time of a single forty-five-minute static video shot. On the contrary, the concept of the “operating body” at the core of her Traveling series (2003), Mariachi 17 (2009), and her tribute to Loïe Fuller, Beware of Imitations! (2014), outfits dancers with a handheld camera in an ever-more-complex challenge to the sequence-shot. The space perceived from the perspective of the body is like a visual avalanche, which contrasts information media with an organic sensorium that the brain cannot absorb. Theatricality reappears here in the form of suspense, trompe-l’oeil, and radical shifts of scale and distance. In her series of videos FILM NOIR (2014-2017), the artist composes a political observation of the cinema of the 1960s by focusing on what is revealed by the state of the bodies of background actors recruited from the local population to appear in sword-and-sandal epics shot in Spain under the Franco regime.
La Ribot’s work moves back and forth between bodies and things, between theater and exhibitions. Her 2006 performative installation, Laughing Hole features three female dancers in a pile of cardboard boxes covered in inscriptions and unleashes a high-tension critical charge: “Gaza party,” “immigrant for sale,” “brutal hole,” etc. Constantly laughing women literally carry these words like precarious placards. In 2010, she conceived Walk the Chair, an installation of fifty folding chairs with quotes on them, which suggests an active awareness of the spectator’s role and questions his or her relationship to the objects in the exhibition. An inscription on one of the chairs reads: “I dreamed that all the pieces of art in the world, millions and millions of them, came to life and ate all of us.” The human presence circulates, unstable, the individual’s place is never a given. This is also expressed in live performances for the stage such as Gustavia (2008), written and performed with Mathilde Monnier, an homage to slapstick and the anarchistic and absurd rebellion of things, and the radical El Triunfo de la Libertad (2014), written and directed with Juan Dominguez and Juan Loriente. In the latter piece, the audience is faced with an entirely empty, deserted stage. The text of an invisible play scrolls on LED monitors like the stock exchange rate at Times Square, while a sequence of light cues as precise as it is enigmatic lays bare the fabrication of theater. Finally, in group works that make full use of the experimental dimension of her art, La Ribot explores the potential of a collective body, in which an organic and intuitive sharing of the creative gesture is at play. One of these group works, 40 Espontáneos (2004) features forty amateur performers, whose activity on stage uses slow repetition to visually and materially assemble a collaborative memory. More recently, Happy Island (2018), which was created with the company Dançando com a Diferença, was developed for dancers with disabilities. Combining individual portraits and group energy, this piece sensitively creates a space for movement in which sensuality, sexuality, and the imagination claim their place as the pivot between art and life.
To date, La Ribot continues to see the Distinguished Pieces as an unfinished work in progress, a conceptual lab that fuels all of her choreographic thought, and a diary of her political views of the world. The first three series, which were subtly informed by the ready-made and assemblage, use the solo to anchor the work in the great lineage of revolutionary gestures made since the rise of modern dance through the work of dancer-choreographers: 13 Piezas distinguidas (1993-1994), Más distinguidas (1997), and Still Distinguished (2000). These three series led to Panoramix (1993-2003), a three-hour complete anthology that was first performed at Tate Modern (London) and made full use of all the characteristics of a museum gallery. In PARAdistinguidas (2011), La Ribot returned to the stage to attempt to disrupt her own work by introducing solos choreographed by other women dancers and the participation of twenty amateur background performers. More recently, the ten pieces composing the Another Distinguée series (2016) have been performed by the tight, darting trio she forms with Juan Loriente and Tami Manhekela. In semi-darkness, on a stage blocked by a shapeless mass, it seems impossible for the body to settle. Space tightens around constrained movements in farcical dark sketches harboring a threat of violence.
La Ribot’s videos and installations have been displayed in a variety of exhibitions. Some of these works are in the permanent collections of public institutions: Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo de Vitoria (País Vasco), Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris), Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofia, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris), MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla i León (León), La Panera (Lleida).
By Marcella Lista, Chief Curator of the New Media Collection, National Museum of Modern Art-Centre Pompidou, Paris