Premiere April 20th 2007 - Vidéodanse / Centre Pompidou - Paris, France. Movie on ’distinguished pieces’. Duration: 160min Written and Directed: La Ribot. Performer: La Ribot. Editing: Sylvie Rodriguez. Editing Assistant: Sandra Roth. Grading: Santine Muñoz. Sound Design: Clive Jenkins. Graphic Design: Gag Comunicación. Produced by: La Ribot - Genève. Coproduction: Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council / La Casa Encendida de la Obra Social de Caja, Madrid, Spain / Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France / Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona, Spain / La Ribot 36 Gazelles, London, UK. La Ribot - Genève is supported by la Ville de Genève, la République et canton de Genève, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, La Loterie Romande.
Film
This 2007 video compilation features La Ribot’s own performances of the Distinguished Pieces and brings together her preferred recordings of its thirty-four parts. It also includes footage of the 1991 work Socorro! Gloria!, the “striptease” referred to in the DVD’s title: not a Distinguished Piece itself, but a key starting point for the project. The accompanying booklet contains a short essay by José A. Sánchez.
The sequencing of the pieces in Treintaycuatropiècesdistinguées&onestriptease opts to ignore chronology: the viewer is propelled forward and backward in time and we see La Ribot now older, now younger, her hair changing colour from blonde to red to (in one or two films) periwinkle blue. But although the DVD plays tricks with time, its sequencing sheds a clear light on the shifts in thinking about spatiality and audience relationship that propelled the Distinguished Pieces’ development. 13 Piezas distinguidas,1993, was made for a space resembling a traditional proscenium arch theatre with wings and a unidirectional audience perspective, and we see this clearly, for instance, in Fatelo con me, a teasing “fan dance” that La Ribot performs using a sheet of brown cardboard she’d originally retrieved from a skip. Más distinguidas, 1997, was first designed for an apron stage and so its component pieces retain an element of frontality. In Still Distinguished, 2000, however, the spatial relations of traditional theatre have been abandoned. Devised for performance in galleries and using video as well as live action, Still Distinguished allows audiences near-complete freedom of movement around the performance space and the dancer’s body. Works such as Another Bloody Mary invite audiences to take a kind of aerial view of the performer, activating the horizontal plane and the audience’s proximity in a way that would be impossible in a conventional theatre.