Pressed Daily

Dance

Dancer Anna Williams of Ricochet Dance Productions commissioned La Ribot to choreograph the solo Pressed Daily for her in 1999. Also involved was Madrid fashion designer Pepe Rubio, whose unorthodox costume design played a key part in the work.

The garment was made from a wild variety of objects ranging from scissors, postcards and water bottles to a Carmen Miranda-style headdress adorned with flowers and bananas. However, it was down to Williams, who began the work unclothed with the “costume” scattered at random across the stage floor, to do the actual construction. Moving in time to a frisky Hungarian folk tune, her task was to “dress up” in these objects – for example, by strapping them to her body with sticky tape (rather as La Ribot trusses herself up with the dismembered parts of a chair in the Distinguished Piece Chair, 2000). Virtuosity and ridiculousness collided as Williams strove at high speed to clothe herself with her peculiar outfit – a costume that became ever more cumbersome with each addition. Requiring new strategies from the dancer with every performance, the work was fresh each time: “pressed daily”, says La Ribot, “like a natural orange juice every morning”.