13 Piezas distinguidas

1993
Show/ Dance/ Theater La Ribot’s Distinguished Pieces came into being gradually, gaining momentum as they went. The first five pieces were presented at the Salamanca University in 1993. The following year, at Teatro Pradillo, Madrid, La Ribot devised five more. Later that year, she created three more and premiered all thirteen at the Teatro Alfil […]

Show/ Dance/ Theater

La Ribot’s Distinguished Pieces came into being gradually, gaining momentum as they went. The first five pieces were presented at the Salamanca University in 1993. The following year, at Teatro Pradillo, Madrid, La Ribot devised five more. Later that year, she created three more and premiered all thirteen at the Teatro Alfil in Madrid, adding the 1991 “striptease” Socorro! Gloria! as an introduction.

13 Piezas distinguidas was key in securing La Ribot’s international reputation and it sets up the parameters for all the solo works in her Distinguished Project (1993-present). They begin with the performer unclothed and present her both as a creative agent and an artwork for viewers’ contemplation and interpretation. All are short, and most use everyday objects or garments (a workers’ warehouse coat, a bed-sheet, a tape-measure, a sheet of brown card, and so on) as starting points for diverse actions, gestures and poses.

There is an unorthodox feminist dimension to La Ribot’s explorations. In Capricho mio (no. 8 in the series) she dons a bath towel and measures herself with a tape measure. Like Martha Rosler’s 1977 work Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, the piece recalls the onus placed on women to monitor their bodies’ conformity to prescribed physical norms; but while Rosler’s dutiful female “citizen” remains a passive object of scrutiny, La Ribot refuses to knuckle under, and conducts her anarchic survey in a thoroughly unscientific and arbitrary fashion. Having dangled the tape from the back of her head towards the floor, she proudly declares “Two metres!” Later, after a couple of tries with the tape, she imperiously decrees the length of her nose to be “One”. The duty of measurement becomes a humorous subversion – an eccentric source of narcissistic satisfaction and an assertion of one’s own vision over the world of banal facts.

The Distinguished Pieces’ polemics intertwine with a mobile, unpredictable poetics that collides seemingly incompatible qualities together. In La vaca sueca (piece no. 9), for example, La Ribot puts on an elegant lime-green evening gown and dances to a lugubrious Hungarian folk tune: some kind of lament, maybe. The piece climaxes with La Ribot collapsed on stage, her face hidden in the depths of a black bowler hat. The effect is glamorous and tragic, bizarre and more than a little absurd: unfathomable, and hard to forget.

Adapting systems of fine art patronage to her own ends, La Ribot has sold some of the Distinguished Pieces to various “Distinguished Proprietors”, and Para ti (piece no. 13) plays a game with this very fact. Accompanied by a Django Reinhardt tune, La Ribot launches into a wild dance, full of peculiar gestures. As she goes she dedicates it to members of the audience, only to retract the dedication a moment later. “This is for you. No, not for you. For the woman in red. For this side. For that couple… For my mother! For you, for you, for you…” Hanging in the air is the comical possibility that audience members might be a little relieved not to become dedicatees of this strange and rather awkward offering. Thus, the first series of Distinguished Pieces ends with a work that (to put it bluntly) totally screws up conventional final-curtain niceties: “Thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience…” Like the proverbial free lunch, it suggests, gifts always come at a price, and it might be wise to beware performance artists bearing them.

credits

Premiere October 31st 1994 - Teatro Alfil de Madrid, Spain. First series of ’distinguished pieces’. Duration: 60min Written and Directed: La Ribot. Performer: La Ribot. Direction Assistant: Gonzalo Ribot . Lighting Design: Cora. Music: Fernando López-Hermoso, Ivano Fossati, Getz/Gilberto, Django Reinhardt, Popular Hungarian music. Administration: Carmen Alcalde. Communication and press: Christina Barchi. Produced by La Ribot. Supported by Actividades Culturales Universidad de Salamanca, Ce y AC Comunidad de Madrid, INAEM, Ministerio de Cultura, Spain, and the distinguished proprietors.
 

 

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