Dance
Between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s La Ribot conducted a wide range of choreographic experiments, while at the same time establishing tactics and devices that have become aesthetic constants in her work. Her first choreographic work, Carita de ángel, 1985, featured a trio of women performers and a collaged musical score, as many later works were to do, and made use of her beloved folding wooden chairs and simple workers’ overalls. A year later, with dancer-choreographer Blanca Calvo, she founded the Madrid-based company Bocanada Danza and co-produced pieces including Bocanada, 1986, Repíteteme 1987, and Ahí va Viviana 1988. Bocanada Danza drew together dancers, musicians and artists working in diverse genres, from classical and contemporary dance via jazz to music hall entertainment, and this adventurously hybrid, interdisciplinary, collaborative approach has, in different ways, characterised La Ribot’s creative work ever since.
Bocanada Danza capitalised on the freewheeling art scene in 1980s Madrid. La Ribot associates its risk-taking spirit with the political mood at the time: after forty years years of dictatorship, the social fabric continued to feel fragile, but there was ample scope for anarchistic cultural experimentation and women were starting to explore a new visibility and freedom of expression. However, La Ribot’s early work was also informed by travels outside Spain and an increasing acquaintance with international experimentation in dance, performance and film. In dance, she cites Pina Bausch, Magy Marin, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham and Alvin Nikolais as key inspirations. Also in the mix were Joan Brossa, Cindy Sherman, Dario Fo, the political satires of Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Berlanga, and silent movies. Female pioneers of dance – Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller – remained her heroines.
It was this cultural omnivorousness that eventually persuaded La Ribot to quit Bocanada Danza and reinvent her practice. The de-subjectivising tendencies of the visual art avant-garde – in particular Duchamp, Cage, Conceptualism and the Dadaists – confirmed her own growing dislike of unreflective expressionism in art. The work of Erik Satie became a pivotal influence. She pursued strategies that were simple, light, immediate and based in ideas rather than feelings, and in the early years of the next decade her researches bore fruit, in the shape of the first series of Distinguished Pieces.