Premiere March 26th 2003 at the Tate Modern, London during the Live Culture and curated by Live Art Development Agency. Panoramix merges all the ’distinguished pieces’ created between 1993 and 2000. Written and Directed: La Ribot. Lighting Design and Sound Design: Daniel Demont.Blue. Costumes: Pepe Rubio. Working space Almudena Ribot Production Manager: Jo Hughes. Production Assistant: Bibi Serafim. Music: Django Reinhardt, Rubén Gonzalez and Hungarian folk song. Fatelo con me by Ivano Fosatti, Eufemia by Fernando Lopez Hermoso, Trois valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté by Erik Satie, Oh ! Sole ! and 19 equilibrios y un largo by Javier Lopez de Guereña, Pasodoble and Fragments of Belmonte by Carles Santos, Moral Morph and Jealous Guy by LB/Atom™, Max by Paolo Conte, 55 291 by Velma. Photos: Manuel Vason. Produced by La Ribot-36 Gazelles, London. An Artsadmin associated project (London). Special thanks to Maria Carmela Mini, Paz Santa Cecilia, the distinguished proprietors and everyone who has supported the project from the beginning.
Show/ Dance/ Theater
Panoramix, 1993-2003, is a retrospective that takes La Ribot’s thirty-four Distinguished Pieces (13 Piezas distinguidas, 1994, Más distinguidas, 1997, and Still Distinguished, 2000) and turns them into a omnibus or “meta-performance” lasting three hours.
Panoramix breaks with the Distinguished Pieces’ original chronology, sequencing them following a new technical, formal and aesthetic logic. Spectators are free to move around the performance space and view each piece from their own preferred perspective, for example by taking up an “aerial view” of pieces in which La Ribot performs lying down. In La Ribot’s words, the whole “white cube” is made “useful”: a layer of brown cardboard renders the floor a friendly surface for both the audience and the performer, and as the work proceeds objects and clothes are peeled from the walls, where they have been fixed with parcel tape like gallery exhibits, and distributed across the floor. The space’s horizontal and vertical planes are re-activated in a new relationship; in the words of performance theorist Andre Lepecki, Panoramix unfolds “in a toppled geometric dimension”. The “vertical-representational” plane that is traditionally privileged in Western high-cultural productions is dethroned, and the “lowly” floor – traditionally associated with base physicality, animality and dirt – is given a new status and value.
Combining strategies derived from contemporary art, contemporary dance, live art and experimental performance, Panoramix is one of the clearest expressions of the transdisciplinary character of La Ribot’s work, and its five performances have formed a key element in experimental programming at some of Europe’s leading contemporary art venues, including Tate Modern, London, the Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.