La Ribot: “In dance you have to give shape to the ideas that pass through you inside”

The clothes mixed up in a trunk in the studio of María Ribot (Madrid, 61 years old), La Ribot for the art world, come to life when she pulls out a random garment and tells its story.

They all keep more than one.

“The creation of my pieces always starts with clothes and objects.

It is a plastic way to start and I open this trunk as if it were my palette of colors and shapes.

“I work with the dancers and we study the textures, the movements…” she says.

Some garments have accompanied her since her first

performances

in Spain in the eighties.

Many of them moved with her to London when she settled in the nineties and, since she stayed to live in Geneva in 2004, her survivors mix with new acquisitions.

“Look!” he exclaims when he finds a red T-shirt, “Juan [actor Juan Loriente] wore it in a play in 1995. Then I took it everywhere, as if it were something essential,” he says questioningly. this decision, but not the value of the object.

Ribot is tall, keeps her body in shape, has the curious gaze of an artist, has great humor, the experience of almost 40 years of work and the recognition of the profession.

Her awards range from the Golden Lion of the Venice Dance Biennale to the National Dance Prize in Spain, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts or the Swiss Grand Prix for Dance.

And her works are part of important public and private collections, such as the Pompidou Center and the National Center for Plastic Arts, both in Paris, the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum and the La Caixa Foundation.

Rehearsal of the play LaBOLA.Pablo Zamora

Without ever letting go of dance, he has not stopped maintaining dialogues with other disciplines and drawing nourishment from them.

She was the first Spanish choreographer to be represented by an art gallery, that of Soledad Lorenzo.

“Yes, there have been

performers

like Pilar Albarracín or Esther Ferrer, but I don't know about choreographers,” she says.

Lorenzo had the vision of hosting in her gallery one of her series of her

Distinguished Pieces,

short choreographic works that, since 1993, María Ribot has represented in theaters and museums, as shows or

performances.

“The deal with the distinguished owners was that those who acquired a piece did not keep anything tangible.

The owners were angels who questioned the value of living things, but they gave me concrete money and thanks to that I could make the next piece, especially at the beginning.”

She says that later she had a hard time maintaining the price and the idea because people close to her acquired them (today many are renowned artists such as Mathilde Monnier, Jérôme Bel, Juan Domínguez or Olga Mesa).

“Soledad Lorenzo acquired the penultimate one of that time.

When she made the donation to the Reina Sofía years later, it was stipulated that the museum could schedule it to be performed, or reactivated, by me or another dancer.”

Rehearsal of the play 'LaBOLA'.Pablo Zamora

The

Distinguished Pieces

were a way of ensuring professional continuity and giving value to the ephemeral.

“The idea of ​​how the industrial is married with the economy of effort, with the body, with poetry and with the truth of releasing energy is perhaps inherited from my father, who was a businessman.

Uniting all that with society is my language and with the

Distinguished Pieces

I try to understand it on my scale.”

He explains that they were born from a very specific social and cultural policy context in Spain.

"And when I knew that I was not going to be able to fully develop them in Spain, I went to London after visiting the city and being amazed by the energy there was."

Rehearsal of the play 'LaBOLA'.Pablo Zamora

A few months ago he moved to his studio in Geneva.

He has done it within the same building, an old 19th century watch factory, now a city heritage site, that he shares with other artists.

“It may be because it is related to time or because of the new light that comes in through the windows, but since I am in this new space I have calmed down.”

Curiously (or not), this place also hosted the great Russian choreographer George Balanchine in the sixties, one of the most relevant figures of 20th century ballet.

And to Beatriz Consuelo, dancer of the Marquis of Cuevas, who set up a school here that all the relevant people from La Ribot's contemporaries in Switzerland passed through.

The history of dance inside a building that, if not known, would go unnoticed.

La Ribot in her studio in the center of Geneva.

Pablo Zamora

On the walls of the studio there are plates with photos from his exhibition

LaBOLA overflows

- which is currently on display at the Max Estrella gallery in Madrid - and a giant image from the filming of

Spartacus,

by Stanley Kubrick.

“It's one of the movies I've seen the most times,” he admits.

In the image appear hundreds of extras who played rebellious slaves in the film and who inspired Ribot to create several works.

First,

40 Spontaneous

(2004), in which he worked with 40 non-professional performers in a theater, and then,

Film Noir

(2014-2017), a video in which he compared the extras of

Spartacus

with those of

El Cid,

by Anthony Mann, both filmed in Spain in the sixties.

“Kubrick filmed with the inhabitants of Colmenar Viejo [Madrid].

The work of those extras gives me goosebumps because they are the faces of the defeated, of the countryside.

Meanwhile, a few kilometers away,

El Cid

was being filmed with members of the Spanish Navy as extras, provided by Carrero Blanco.”

Under the gaze of La Ribot, those bodies and gestures immortalized in both films show the ideological contrast in Franco's dictatorship.

Frame from the filming of 'Spartacus', by Stanley Kubrick, filmed in the sixties in Colmenar Viejo.

The work of the extras in this film is an inspiration for La Ribot.Pablo Zamora

On top of a red sofa, placed like someone who leaves their bag on a chair when they arrive home, rests the figure of the Golden Lion of Venice.

In the other corner, his work desk with an upside-down globe, books on dance, music and history marked with colored post-its and a stool that she stole from her boyfriend in the eighties when he was studying Architecture.

“It was perfect for my first work and I will use it in the next one,” he says, showing it as the treasure that he represents for her.

Your future projects accumulate like the objects on your shelves.

Having just released her film debut in Spain, she has done so by playing her own character and signing the choreographies for

Our Last Dance,

the film directed by Swiss director Delphine Lehericey, which won the Audience Award at the last Locarno festival.

“Delphine sent me the script and, although it is the story of a duel, I laughed reading it,” she says.

“I found it powerful and very difficult to tell that topic with comedy and contemporary dance.

I thought it was a good mess to get into,” she confesses.

But the character of the choreographer that the director had written did not convince her.

“She was classic and said things like an unfriendly diva who mistreats the dancers.

I told her that I wasn't like that, that she didn't feel like doing it, and then she asked me to say whatever I wanted.

And I did it,” she says, laughing.

La Ribot with part of her administration, production team and dancers, at the door of her studio building.

Pablo Zamora

As in every work by Ribot, the film has several layers and, on this occasion, there is a hidden revenge.

“People have the idea that contemporary dance is very boring.

And to reflect this, I proposed that a version of Oh!

appear in the film.

Sole!,

a piece I did with Juan Loriente in 1995″.

When she was first depicted, she was seven months pregnant.

“It was a hard 45-minute piece in which we sang

O sole

mio

at the top of our voices, while Juan held me in his arms and I threw myself on my stomach on the floor.

It was brutal.

People were desperate in the stalls, and they left me notes saying what a horror,” she says, interrupted by her own laughter.

“My revenge on the history of art was to put it in the film so that 10,000 people could see it at the Locarno festival.

When I went on stage and saw all that audience, I tasted my revenge.”

On the La Ribot website you can see that recording from the nineties and many others.

It is not a normal page, but a device full of files, texts, graphic and audiovisual documents from his entire career.

A luxury for anyone who wants to study his work, as the artist and art historian Jaime Conde-Salazar has done, one of the people who knows the most about the Madrid artist.

He is now finishing a thesis on her, and states: “Few Spaniards in the performing arts have had such a constant presence on the European circuit and such continuous recognition over the years.

Nobody has a track record like her.”

For Conde-Salazar, the symbolic culmination of La Ribot, of relating dance to other arts on equal terms, was the realization of

LaBOLA

at the Prado Museum last year.

The award of the Silver Lion of Venice, items of clothing, everyday objects and books rest on the sofa in La Ribot's studio.

Pablo Zamora

Maral Kekejian, curator of the Cultural Program of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, devised this action with the artist to inaugurate the project in Spain.

It consisted of three dancers who exchanged their clothes and objects they found on the floor in the central hallway of the museum.

It happened on a Sunday in July, under the astonished gaze of the visitors, who expected nothing, and the artist's fans, who longed for everything.

“Ribot has been a reference since he was young in how

to hack

and enter a world in which the value of the corporeal was not part of the artistic discourse,” explains Kekejian.

“In front of the

Portrait of Charles V,

by Titian;

the Lavatorio,

by Tintoretto, or

Las meninas,

by Velázquez, which is the first

performance

in history, Ribot dialogues with painting because she is painting.

But she doesn't paint pictures, she paints bodies,” Conde-Salazar reflects.

Until April 18, the photographic documentation of that day is on display at Max Estrella, the artist's current representative gallery.

In La Ribot's persistent dialogue with everything that inspires her, she has crossed paths with Esther Ferrer.

Together they will inaugurate an exhibition this year at Frac Franche-Comté, in Besançon (France).

“From this meeting I want artistic contact with her.

We admire each other a lot and I am going to make a piece that speaks to one of their people.”

As she tells it, she picks up a sort of crinoline-shaped hat from the floor of her study and puts it on her head.

“Elvira Grau has designed it for

Juana Fiction,

a work in collaboration with the director Asier Puga and the Zaragoza Auditorium Chamber Orchestra, which we will premiere in Spain in September.”

In it, La Ribot returns to the figure of Juana I of Castile, mixing dance and music, to question her disappearance in history.

“In 1992, the same year in which Spain commemorated the fifth centenary of Columbus's arrival in the New World and hosted the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Seville Expo, I vindicated the figure of this woman in

The Sad One I saw.

A queen who never reigned, a more invisible woman, whom I never called crazy.

Now, after several feminist studies that have placed it in another place in history, I return to it with enthusiasm.”

A portrait of the artist Pablo Zamora

Ribot lives in constant transformation, questioning itself.

“In dance you have to give shape to the ideas that pass through you inside.

When I can write with movement and everything passes through the body, it is wonderful.

That's why I dedicate myself to this.

And I say write, what not paint and what not say.”

And she has always done it with materials that she has had on hand: cardboard, used clothes, everyday objects and her own body, although, on more than one occasion, she has confessed to having felt afraid when exposing herself naked in front of an audience. nearby.

“In

Panoramix

[which she presented at the Tate Modern in 2003 and which has been part of the experimental programming of art centers such as the Center Pompidou] there are three hours where I am alone with the public a hand's breadth away.

In certain cities there has been a very aggressive atmosphere and I have been afraid of being so vulnerable: in a tight spot and alone.

Although I feel much more naked sometimes when I speak.

That does scare me.”

Folding wooden chairs have been another of his essential tools.

He used them for the first time in 1985, with

Angel Face,

and in

Walk the Chair

(2010) he spread 50 in the room of a London gallery, in which he had recorded quotes (from Isadora Duncan and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others) about the motion.

To decipher them, visitors had to manipulate the chairs, thus becoming improvised performers of their own choreographies.

“Pina Bausch said that beauty always comes from movement.

He referred to that of people and that of things.

And I subscribe to that phrase.

Dance, for me, is capturing what is happening inside you, on your skin, here and in the world.

Sometimes, when I have been very depressed and it seemed to me that what I had in hand was the last thing I was going to do, I have held on to an idea.

Dance and art have saved me since youth.

Concentrating and insisting saves you from many things.”

Since 2004, Geneva has been her home, that of her two children and her ex-partner, the Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin, with whom she shares a studio and equipment.

And from here she has no intention of moving.

“They treat me very well.

In the eighties, the French carried out the decentralization of choreographic centers.

Every major city had one and later they also created dance houses.

In Switzerland, in the last 15 years there has been an incredible change.

There are now a multitude of performing arts schools, festivals, creative venues and well-supported theatres.

In Spain, institutional support for dance, and for performances in general, is slower and more difficult.”

There is no doubt that, throughout his career, he has taken the right and risky steps on a path that he invented while walking.

In 2026, the Reina Sofía Museum will host a major retrospective in recognition of his career.

Its director, Manuel Segade, explains: “Over the years, La Ribot has provoked a kind of genealogy or affiliation with many younger artists who use it as an example and space for reflection.

It implies the invention of a new tradition for that space that we call scenic and that is fundamental to understand the present of the plastic arts in our country.

She is the pioneering force that still has a lot to say.”

In 2003 she already exhibited in the same space

Panoramix,

which in three hours collected all of her distinguished work so far.

“In 2026 I want to make all the

distinguished Pieces

that I will have until then.

It will be about 10 hours,” Ribot anticipates.

“Almost all live.

"It's going to be a great exercise in detachment and versioning, as I will invite many of my usual collaborating artists to cover them or interpret them with me."

—And have you thought about what will happen to your work when you die?

—No, and I don't feel like anything, but the others are very annoying about that.

The art world is obsessed with conservation.

I will leave everything there and then everyone can interpret it as they want.

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