« Gustavia » de Mathilde Monnier & La Ribot

Nearly 20 years after its creation, the two artist-choreographers La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier reactivate their iconic piece Gustavia. A biting, funny, and impactful duo inspired by burlesque, whose renewed feminist movements today highlight its vitality, relevance, and impertinence.

Amidst a profusion of black velvet, from the stage margins to the floor, La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier – in leotards and shoes, also black – engage in a burlesque act where the expenditure of energy, repetition, and accident create an irresistible comic tension – somewhere between a knee striptease and a verbal logorrhoea.

With its techniques of reversal, striking, and dodging, classic burlesque is the art of transforming incompetence into competence.

This is precisely the path followed by Gustavia, the false stage name of a woman attempting to discuss grand subjects beyond her grasp and her profession as an artist.

With Gustavia, the two choreographers evoke both contemporary art and their working methods, throughout a piece that the years have imbued with new meaning.

When they created it in 2008 at the Montpellier Danse festival, La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier already knew each other very well and used it as an opportunity to take stock of their lives and respective careers, thus continuing a conversation begun fifteen years earlier.

Their choreographic practices notably share the characteristic of borrowing their vocabulary from other aesthetics, starting with theatre. They reactivate the piece today in light of the feminist movements (such as ) that have emerged since.

With this feminine plea, they propose a new, even darker, funnier, and more impactful interpretation of two free women facing the world and its violences with humour and poetry. Vincent Théval Duration: 1h Category: Dance Theatre