Premiere July 2th-4th 2008 - Festival Montpellier Danse 08, Montpellier, France. Duration: 60min Written and Directed: Mathilde Monnier and La Ribot. Performers: Mathilde Monnier and La Ribot. Lighting Design: Eric Wurtz. Sound Design: Olivier Renouf with music of Mouse on Mars, Square Pusher, Christian Vogel et Matthew Ship. Costumes: Dominique Fabrègue assisted by Laurence Alquier. Stage Design: Annie Tolleter. Coproduction: Festival Montpellier Danse 2008, Centre Pompidou - Les Spectacles Vivants / Festival d’Automne à Paris / Théâtre de la Ville - Paris, Centre de Développement Chorégraphique – Toulouse / Midi-Pyrénées, Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos - Culturgest - Lisbon, La Comédie de Genève, Mercat de les Flors - Barcelona. For this project, La Ribot - Genève is supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, la Ville de Genève – Département de la culture and la République et Canton de Genève.
Show / Dance / Theater
Devised and performed by La Ribot with the French dancer and choreographer Mathilde Monnier, Gustavia, 2008, has been described as a “burlesque duet”, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It certainly features burlesque devices – for example, a slapstick-inspired episode involving pratfalls, collisions and a couple of polystyrene “wooden planks”. There’s also a peculiar kind of “striptease” in which Monnier and La Ribot repeatedly bare just their knees. However, if the main purpose of burlesque is to deflate seriousness, Gustavia travels the opposite way. Estranging its comic devices with lengthy repetition and other tactics, it can be puzzling, abrasive and even upsetting to watch. A significant agenda is in play: Gustavia offers a complex feminist critique of the demands placed on women to “perform” their gender competently – both in the theatre and in everyday life.
With their identical black dance suits, slim figures and pale colouring, Monnier and La Ribot look like twins and some interpreters have seen them as a double portrait of the eponymous Gustavia. However, “Gustavia” is arguably a generic rather than a specific female identity, and the two dancers’ relationship is very mobile. They stand as twins, doppelgangers, competing divas, and a comedy double-act – and when La Ribot swings into action with the rubber plank, repeatedly striking Monnier down, they turn into strangers, seemingly unaware of the other’s presence.
In Gustavia’s final section Monnier and La Ribot deliver a long duologue composed of sentences all beginning with the words “A woman…”. Some statements are unexceptional (“A woman locks her house with a key”) while others are patently absurd (“a woman has three breasts”) but they all exploit the ambiguity as to whether they are describing a specific woman or making a normative assertion about women in general. This section is genuinely funny, but it too has a serious implication: that the performance of femininity involves an endless stream of demands that are often silly, conflicting or simply impossible to achieve. Probing into grim states of mind and acute gender-political problems, the collaborative work Gustavia is maybe La Ribot’s darkest expression to date.