Premiere November 21st-23rd 1997 - Desviaciones, Madrid, Spain. Second series of the ’distinguished pieces’. Duration: 60min Written and Directed: La Ribot. Performer: La Ribot. Lighting Design: Daniel Demont. Divana costume, 19 esquilibrios y un largo costume & Angelita wings: Pepe Rubio. Music: Erik Satie, Javier Lopez de Guereña, Rubén Gonzalez, Carles Santos. Produced by La Ribot, Supported by INAEM, Ministry of Culture of Spain and the collaboration of ICA, Live Arts, London, Danças Na Cidade, Lisbon, and the distinguished proprietors. An Artsadmin associated project.
Show/ Dance/ Theater
Más distinguidas comprises Distinguished Pieces number 14 to 26 and was premiered in October 1997 in Madrid. It follows the pattern established in the first Distinguished Pieces of 1993-4: all the pieces are short, they begin with the performer unclothed, and most use an everyday object or a garment as a motor for the actions involved. Writer Irène Filiberti points out that in the Distinguished Pieces, La Ribot presents her own body as “an objet d’art”: “both as considered subject, and living matter”. That’s true of the entire project, but comparing the first series of Distinguished Pieces with Más distinguidas we see a shift in tactics: the slippage between inanimate objects and the live performer’s body, latent in the 1993-94 pieces, becomes much more visible.
In Manual de uso (piece No. 20), 1997, La Ribot sets up a particularly wry and funny confusion between bodies and inanimate stuff. She reads out a list of operating instructions lifted from consumer goods manuals and then tries to apply them to her own body. Some are vaguely achievable while others lead to absurd and even risky manoeuvres. A seed of doubt takes root: are we really in control of the objects around us, or do they – more likely – control us? Narcisa (No. 16), 1996, involves another kind of confusion, this time between images and the real. La Ribot takes polaroid photos of her breasts and pubic mound then tapes the three images to the body parts represented. Simultaneously concealing and revealing her unclothed body, the photos gradually develop, and point ingeniously toward two equally fraught relationships: between reality and representation, and between feminism and the representation of the female body.
If Narcisa contains a nod to Magritte and his pipe, then Divana (No. 25), 1997, has fun with the work of Yves Klein and John Cage. Wearing a preposterous aquamarine-blue costume and wig, La Ribot sits on stage holding a tiny battery-powered fan and a stopwatch and exhorts the audience to attempt four minutes of immobility. The first is for “reflection”, the next for “meditation”, the third for “contemplation” while the last is simply a “silence”. Each of La Ribot’s definitions raises a laugh, but they have a critical undertow. When Klein, in 1957, placed different prices on a group of identical monochromes, he explained that this reflected each work’s specific “pictorial sensibility”, leaving unclear whether the gesture was a case of foggy-brained sincerity or an avant-garde stunt. La Ribot’s Divana skewers that kind of authorial chicanery and suggests a more general scepticism about the hokey spiritualism in a good deal of performance art. As Cage understood, silence doesn’t need a transcendental gloss to be a valid aesthetic object. Through each of Divana’s silences the little fan whirrs away loyally: artificial “ambient sound” underlining the piece’s more affectionate Cagean reference.