La Ribot, LaughingHole© , Le Quartz, Brest 2007, photo: Anne Maniglier
La Ribot
Laughing Hole (2006)

La Ribot (*1962, Spain, Switzerland) develops her work between dance, theatre and performance. The contin- ued exploration of a body-in-motion language and the interaction with elaborate visual elements in her pieces joins with the use of the oral or written word to produce an eloquent set of mental associations. The questioning and exploring of the binomial spectator-performer has marked her career and has been reflected in several of her pieces like in the project 40 espontáneos (2004), in which a group of people with no theatrical experience take the stage and fluctuate between the role of actors and spectators. Another reflection on the structure and status of the contemporary spectacle is the basis for Piezas distinguidas (1993-2003), a series of 34 short conceptual pieces that were collected in Panoramix (2003). Retrospectives were staged by the dance festival Tanz im August in 2017 and by Festival d’Automne, Paris, in 2019. She has received numerous awards for her work: the Grand Prix suisse de danse par l’Office fédéral de la culture in 2019 amongst and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievements at the Biennale DANZA in Venice 2020.

artist's website: www.laribot.com

Dressed in work gowns of different colours and wearing red slippers, three women enter a space where the public is free to move about. Hysterical laughter that sometimes borders on crying is repeated to exhaustion and is their sound expression during the six-hour performance. The ground is covered with pieces of cardboard facing down. The women, who are always laughing, begin to turn the pieces over, revealing handwritten minimalist messages that are like headlines or insults with socio-political, intimate and existential overtones. By raising these posters, showing them to the public and obsessively taping them to the walls with duct tape, the women’s gestures transform the space. The neutral walls lose their innocence and are upholstered with phrases like ‘Guantanamo Lost’, ‘Over 40s Hole’, ‘Kill me’, ‘Fucking Audience’, adding a new layer of meaning to the space. La Ribot shows the limits and possibilities of laughter as a transformer of content and spaces. Laughing Hole extends the study of motion and its depletion while reflecting the time and place of the performance and its audience.
Performance: 1 April 2009, Centre Pompidou Paris, duration: 6 hrs

Courtesy Cie La Ribot

Format
video, colour, sound, 49:00 min

Issue date
2006

Tags
aging, appropriation, durational performance, exhaustion, laughter/humorous, voice