Premier 26 November 1992 at Teatro Pradillo, Madrid. Written and Directed: La Ribot. Performers: David Bernardo and La Ribot. Music: Alvaro de Cárdeas. Other music: Españolas de los siglos XV, XVII; Jota interpreted by Fernando Palacios. Light Design: Cora. Video: Angel Hernandez and Alfonso Parra. Costumes: Almudena Ribot in collaboration with Pepe Rubio. Stage Design: Almudena Ribot. Photography: Jaime Gorospe. Executive Producer: Angel Varela. Production Assistant: Gonzalo Ribot.
Show/ Dance/ Theater
El Triste Que Nunca Os Vido, a duet for a female and a male performer, was first performed by La Ribot and David Bernardo in Madrid’s Teatro Pradillo. In subsequent presentations the actor Juan Loriente and the dancer Juan Domínguez, both long-time collaborators with La Ribot, recreated the male role.
As the audience enters the theatre at the start of the piece, the two performers join them and progress inside in a slow and elaborately formal manner. Foreshadowing eccentricities yet to come, La Ribot wears an “evening stole” of plastic bubble wrap, and waves her hand continuously in a regal but abstracted gesture; it’s as if she has little sense of her surroundings. Walking alongside, her besuited partner’s role is ambiguous: he might be an old-fashioned jealous husband, an impresario displaying his “diva” to the crowd, a mental nurse, a prison guard, or even a circus trainer leading a performing beast into the ring. Their disturbing and alienated relationship forms the core of the 45 minutes long performance.
In one passage, La Ribot writhes on the floor in a series of fluid yet desperate-seeming serpentine movements while her partner, seated on a stool nearby, regards her with near-indifference. In another, he periodically flings an empty plastic bowl in her direction: a cruelly dehumanizing gesture. Toward the end of the piece he dresses La Ribot in a kind of diver’s outfit and, his own face concealed beneath a diving mask and snorkel, monitors her actions as she crashes her body repeatedly and painfully against an upright piano, producing jarring bursts of sound.
El triste que nunca os vido was partly inspired by the tragic life of “Juana la Loca” – Joanna the Mad (1497-1555) – the enigmatic, long suffering Castillian queen who was officially declared insane and, for nearly fifty years, imprisoned in a nunnery. The work was created in the same year that Spain commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World and hosted the Olympic Games in Barcelona and Expo ’92 in Seville, and its imaginative projection into the nightmarish world of the forgotten prisoner-queen was partly intended as a corrective to the one-sidedly celebratory historical narratives proliferating in the popular media.
El triste que nunca os vido now exists at a distance from its original context and is only viewable via video. Nevertheless, its representation of mental dislocation, alienation and human cruelty has a continuing power to affect and disturb.