Award Ceremony of the Biennale Danza 2020:
La Ribot, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement
Extravagant Grande Dame of contemporary art, leading figure in today’s dance, her work – rigorous and radical – 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.
Claudia Castellucci, Silver Lion
We have long known this sober, serious, minimalist and demanding choreographer, who works with sacrality at her art. But she recently astonished us with her piece choreographed to Catalogue des oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen.
She may even have astonished herself, for it revealed, with a sobriety of expression, delicate and always discrete epiphanies, which take us back to the origins of creation, to our love for dance in particular, and art in general.
