Forty-seven years as a prisoner. From 1509 until his death in 1555, locked up in Tordesillas. First by his father, Fernando the Catholic. Later, by his son Carlos V. Both of them, including his grandson Felipe II, erased from history any possible trace of this condemnation, its documents and its correspondence. This is the story that La Ribot tackled in 1992, tired of so many men, heroes and conquerors, exalted in the splendor of what is clumsily called “V Centenary of the Discovery of America”. The story of Juana I of Castile. Today, 34 years later, this artist returns to the figure of the community queen with Juana Fiction and he did it with a former ally, the interpreter Juan Loriente, and with one of the iconoclasts of contemporary music, Asier Puga and his Enigma Ensemble.
Ribot says that, in this piece from 92, The sad one who never saw youfocused on state violence against a woman. This weekend, however, he presented an evocative piece, both luminous and dark. A piece that also condenses a good part of the know-how of this choreographer who has known, like no one else, how to make contemporary dance shine in this country. The work It is a decantation where dance, in situ, performance, installation and body art meet.
Juana Fictioncreated this summer at the Cloître des Célestins of the Avignon Festival, is a metronome. On this occasion, it could be seen in the south patio of the Condeduque barracks. The piece began at 8:11 p.m., just as the Madrid sun was beginning to set. And the work is a sunset, a journey from light to darkness. The piece ended an hour later, just before the moon slipped over the walls of the barracks and lit up the patio.
Conceptual Chotis
The beginning of the piece is full of light and shows vestiges of Dalinian surrealism. La Ribot is Juana. Juan Loriente, who already directed the piece in 1992 with the artist, is her jailer. This first part will be supported by an impressive musical composition based on a collection of songs discovered by Asier Puga, a collection of songs from the time that were given to the queen at her wedding to Felipe el Hermoso. A compendium of the musical currents of the golden age with which Puga and the composer Iñaki Estrada have created a beautiful and contemporary piece for strings, wind and choir. The voices of Polyphonic Choir Schola Cantorum Paradisi Portae They filled the patio singing under violas, violins, cellos, clarinets and synthesizers.
Maria, La Ribot, came on stage wearing a dress reminiscent of Dalí’s play, Mae West’s Roomthe culmination of Catalan pop art that can now be seen at the Dalí Museum in Figueres. The dress, made of fine gauze, in a play of superimposed perspectives composes, with the artist’s body, the face of this queen, a sensual face far from the romantic and funerary representation with which Juana I has traditionally been associated. fetish object of this artist, like her red shoes, in this first part the costumes created by Elvira Grau predominate. A golden and colorful wardrobe, of transparencies and air, which gradually introduces the confinement of the queen. The costumes, in themselves, are another work of art.
La Ribot, as in a conceptual chotis, danced on a tiny rotating chair. Above her, he stood up and performed a circular gestural dance with his arms pointed high, toward the sky or the horizon. Half an hour after the beginning of the piece, as the sunset crossed its meridian and the grays and browns that announced the night began to appear, this luminous queen, with her haughty and open gaze, disappeared. Just like the music and the musicians at the center of space, life and hope.
At that moment, a dance began in the foreground, which the audience scattered around the patio could see on their cell phones. An intimate dance performed with a back and torso of great beauty. An inclusion that surprises in this artist, creator of the concept of “operating body” developed in many other pieces such as Call me mariachi (2009), where it is the dancer’s body that functions as a camera that records the images. Here, it is not the body that watches, but rather we see in a fixed shot La Ribot’s organism in torsion, in an expressionist dance of millimetric and precious vertebrae and muscles.
La Ribot, queen of conceptual dance in this country, opened the season with this indispensable Juana Ficción. A piece that reminded the Madrid public that another dance is possible
Then comes the accident. A mysterious and fortuitous accident, La Ribot appears in the courtyard on a bicycle, suddenly falls and remains motionless on the ground. Lorient places black fabrics around him, creating a baroque still life background for his silhouette. Then a body painting action will begin. Lorient, at nightfall, will embalm this Juana with black paint, until her silhouette disappears into the night. During the process, the public approached this living canvas, surrounding it. Only the red lights of a bicycle placed on the ground served as lighting.
The musicians, confused in the audience, continued to play. Puga continued to conduct them. Hearing a baritone half a meter away match his voice to that of a tenor and an alto is an overwhelming experience. At that moment in the piece everything comes together: darkness arrives, oblivion becomes flesh and at the same time all the knowledge of this unclassifiable artist is incorporated.
A Condeduque who leaves
The work marked the inauguration of the new season of the Condeduque Center for Contemporary Culture directed by Natalia Álvarez Simó, director who will leave her position in December. It is not known who will be her successor and if the artistic line will be maintained. There are five years left of management in which this center has become a reference for the performing arts.
The model imagined by Simó is very questionable, not so much in its programming, full of indispensable names of the scene, but in the exhibition scheme. The shows, for the most part, only last two days. Tickets fly away and the manager has been able to score the point of having brought big names of the international or national modern scene and to do so with a very high attendance of the public.
But the bet has its double face, its hidden face, which is very clearly manifested in the queues before entering a room where the “connoisseur” predominates, delighted to be one. Beyond the quality of the shows, the relationship it establishes with the community is very important in a theater. And without qualifying the relationship created in these five years between the Count Duque and the Madrid public, it lacks bets that allow the crossing of audiences and the creation of a fabric not only based on the latest novelty.
But despite this, and knowing what awaits the performing arts in this Madrid where the Popular Party wants to make canon, tradition and repertoire reign, these five years have been full of gems and small miracles that will be remembered for a long time. time. Even if only a few remember them. In addition, Simó has a not inconsiderable intelligence to start a season. In 2021, the Condeduque season opens with an essential (play on words since the piece could only be seen once at the whim of the artist) Based on 1,2,3, the only dance piece by the unclassifiable artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. A piece that is already fundamental to the 21st century and that has defeated all conceptual dance in this country.
This year, La Ribot, queen of conceptual dance in this country, opened the season with this essential Juana FictionA piece that reminded the Madrid public that another dance is possible, that brought back from the annals of time the power of a hybrid art that also tirelessly tends to bury and forget, but that stubbornly persists despite the canon.
This weekend in Condeduque, in the style of La Ribot, the Fluxus force of the 60s resurfaced, the power of Gunter Bruss’s tableaux vivants, a scenic delight that inevitably stood as a posthumous tribute to the artist who in September, Rebeca Horn, a creator known for her body structures that are a Germanic and performative variation of the imprisonment of the female body that Frida Kahlo already warned against, died in Mallorca. In that dark courtyard, as the moon was about to appear in the sky, as the audience left the room and Loriente continued next to the corpse of Juana I of Castile, Madrid dance found one of its hearts, now almost lost.
