La Ribot: Delicious disgust?

La Ribot sells each one of her performances as an art object. As an artist, she is serious and ironic, even humorous. La Ribot’s performance Still Distinguished can be viewed as an installation, happening, or performance. La Ribot herself says that she dances. In dramatic art, it goes without saying that some sit in the audience, where it is dark and safe, while others set themselves up to be seen, exposed in the light. In a gallery, the audience and the performer share the same room, light, and exchange of looks. It is this room La Ribot enters, nude, prepared to sell her performance just like any art object.

La Ribot walks in the midst of her audience in the gallery. Accessories scattered around the room are traces of previous performances, in the middle of which La Ribot places herself as if part of a still life. Short scenes or tableaux vivant follow each other as the audience moves about freely. The nude performer uses string to package herself as airfreight, spreads garlic and tomatoes on her body, knits...

A native of Madrid, now based in London, dancer-choreographer La Ribot has, since 1993, explored the ways of representing the body in her solo series, which she has named Still Distinguished. By using the name La Ribot, Maria Ribot refers to female soloists of the early 1900s, who danced free while their origins remained mysterious and exotic. A diva for the 1990s, La Ribot is conscious of history and the political and ideological preconditions associated with performing, concerning gender, power, and communication.

Still Distinquished is one part in a series of performances. Each part can also be bought, just like other art objects. In a gallery room, the nude female body is compared to a work of art, the fact that both can be bought, and have status, which defines the price. La Ribot, however, succeeds in escaping the clichés of representing femaleness; her presence has ironic power. The status value of the body begins to crack when the audience can sense the dignity of the skin and how it breathes. Unique and transitory, the performance challenges repetition and representation.

Body art aimed at making the body part of the language of art by treating it as material, as part of the vocabulary of visual arts. Dance in the 1990s has brought its own point of view to body art. Choreographers seen in Kiasma Theatre, such as Meg Stuart, Jérôme Bel and Vera Mantero, have all shaped the new way of thinking, which does not abandon dance, but which has almost systematically begun to explore the ways of representing the body, their political or ideological content in particular. Thus, the new school has also begun to explore dance as an expression of the body and communication that cannot be reduced to language and grammar.

La Ribot does not preach, but comments, sometimes ironically, on the state of affairs. Still Distinguished touches the viewer as if by stealth. It honours the shared room and does not attempt to scandalise the naked body. It is enough to feel the proximity of a breathing person, who places herself in the middle of her audience only to present a paradox on the relationship between people and objects. At the same time, it happens to “speak” about many other issues.

Virve Sutinen

La Ribot
Still Distinguished
Kiasma Theatre 26 – 27