La Ribot

Thursday 15 October 2020, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian

La Biennale di Venezia has awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Spanish-Swiss choreographer La Ribot.

“The extravagant grande dame of contemporary art, a leading figure in today’s dance, her rigorous and radical work critiques and mocks metamorphosis, hybridism, absurdity and freedom.
Her work resists any sort of classification: performance, live installation, dance, visual art.
Her contagious art electrifies thought, forces it to reach beyond conventions, to reorganize its reference points.
The black box exploded from the early start of this total artist: she herself is an embodied manifesto that she ceaselessly renews by cheerily destroying preconceptions.
Transdisciplinarity is the mark of her lack of discipline, her physical presence is absolute, she practices poverty with opulence, her actions are shape-shifting; she is a wild and minimalist tragédienne, her sense of humour first excoriates then liberates free-thinking.
She makes us love freedom and its vibrant limits. She has fun.
She makes us happy”.
Marie Chouinard

On 13 October 2020 (Teatro alle Tese, 8:00 pm) La Ribot will present the work Panoramix (1993-2003) as an Italian premiere (repeat performance on 14 October) in the programme of the 14th International Festival of Contemporary Dance.

La Ribot (Madrid, 1962) – Her artistic practice, which began as the winds of freedom blew through Spain in the 1980s, has had a powerful impact of current contemporary dance. Freely borrowing from the vocabulary of theatre, visual arts, performance and cinema, her work highlights the areas of friction between these disciplines. For her, dance is a starting point for a multiplicity of experiments rooted in the language of the body (Marcella Lista, writer and curator).

She has performed live at the Tate Modern (London), at the Théâtre de la Ville, Centre Pompidou & Festival D’Automne (Paris), at the Museo Reina Sofia & Soledad Lorenzo Gallery (Madrid), at the Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, Japan), at the Museu Serralves (Porto), at Art Unlimited - Art Basel, at S.M.A.K. (Ghent), at the Panorama Festival, (Rio de Janeiro), at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City).

Her video works are in the permanent collections of: Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre National des Arts Plastiques - CNAP (Paris), MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), Artium (Centro-Museo de arte contemporáneo vasco), FRAC-Regional Fund for Contemporary Art (Lorraine), La Panera (Lleida), Fundación Cajasol (Seville) and La Casa Encendida-Fundación Montemadrid (Madrid).

In the summer of 2017, the Festival Tanz Im August in Berlin dedicated its retrospective Occuuuppatioooon Berlin! to La Ribot, presenting a selection of her works. In 2019, the Festival d’Automne in Paris paid tribute to her with five performances and an exhibition.

She was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Dance in 2000 and the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2015, acknowledgments awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. La Ribot has also received the 2019 Culture Award for the Visual Arts from the Region of Madrid, and the Swiss Grand Prize for Dance, also in 2019.