Gustavia is a show that brings together two choreographic artists who have very different backgrounds, but are prompted by similar concerns regarding the future of art, and especially performance art.
The show draws on the world of classical burlesque. Classical Burlesque has specific codes and techniques that run through film (Peter Sellers, Tati, Marx Brothers, Keaton, Chaplin, Nanni Moretti...) theater, performance art (Leo Bassi, Anna and Bernard Blume...) as well as the visual arts (Bruce Nauman...).
Burlesque applies techniques of role-reversal and punch-and-dodge; it is an art of transforming incompetence into competence. It distinguishes burlesque heroes from rebel heroes. It emerges from excess speech as well as from absence of speech. Body-burlesque, however, is rooted in squandered energy, repetition and accident. What is conspicuous in burlesque is hidden in dance, since dance has nothing, or almost nothing, comical about it.
Gustavia is a woman's name, but really just a stage name. Gustavia tries to talk about important subjects that are over her head; timeless classical subjects such as womanhood, death, theater, performance, self representation, the artist. Burlesque, not being a genre, provides a framework for the practice of dance, and for modes of thinking and doing. Through an indirect use of burlesque tools, Gustavia tries to freely describe her profession; sidetracks, worries, catastrophes and joys involving the relationship between contemporary art and life.
【Company Intro】
Mathilde Monnier
MATHILDE MONNIER took up dancing quite late. After her experience as a dancer with Viola Farber Dance Company, she took an interest in choreography from 1984, alternating group creations with solos and duets. From piece to piece, she confounds expectations, showing a constantly evolving work. Her artistic interrogations extend from creating movement to wider issues such as the in-common, the relationship to music, the memory, maintaining a continuous link. Her appointment as the Head of Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Centre Chorégraphique in 1994 marked the beginning of a new period, an opening into new artistic fields and a reflection-in-action on the orientation and sharing of an institutional space.
Her shows, among which Pour Antigone, Déroutes, Les lieux de là, Surrogate cities, Soapéra, Twin paradox are performed at major venues and international festivals. She switches between creating projects alone or in collaboration with key figures of the art world: Katerine, Christine Angot, La Ribot, Heiner Goebbels, etc. She has been directing the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin since 2013.
La Ribot
Spanish-born and Geneva-resident, La Ribot is introduced as a dancer, choreographer, film director and visual artist. Her projects starting out from movement, the body and her origins in dance, and then adopting whatever practices, systems or materials her concept prompts. Hence, her works from the 1980s to the present show her working not just with live performance, but also video, speech, writing and sign language, the construction of objects and installations, and "relational" works involving diverse communities: both fellow arts practitioners, and lay people with no previous art-making experience.