N°14

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.