By Victoria Looseleaf
The incredible La Ribot (who normally performs nude), presented a six-hour performance piece, Laughing Hole, at LACMA on Saturday (clothed, we might add). LACMA described the work thusly: “In Laughing Hole a large number of cardboard signs carpet the floor of the gallery where three women amble in continuous laughter using the signs to interact with the audience. As the performance unfolds, the laughter turns into an ambiguous sound indistinguishable from weeping, and the walls of the gallery space are covered with language, enveloping audience and performers alike.”
Alas, while we were unable to get to LACMA, we love La Ribot and were the first to write about her for the Los Angeles Times (click here for that, gulp, 2003 story). We’ve also got the dyed orange mascara brush that she used on a certain body part before she gave it to us after she performed “Mas Distinguidas” (“Still Distinguished”), at Highways Performance Space. Indeed, we love these kinds of conceptual works and though we missed La (her first name is Maria), this time around, we were reminded of a Billy Forsythe installation we saw in Venice last summer at the eighth edition of the dance portion of the Biennale.
Here’s what we wrote for Dance Magazine about the Forsythe piece: “I was so intrigued I returned twice to see Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, an installation by The Forsythe Company that featured Brock Labrenz in a four-hour performance presented on six different nights. This was stamina of heroic proportions, proving that, in this case, youth is not wasted on the young!
Set in a vast space in one of the Arsenale warehouses, the work featured the dancer moving in Forsythe’s signature fashion, with speedy bursts of quirky bends, scrunchy shoulders and questing head-bobs. The predominant sounds were the squeaking of his tennis shoes, as this determined, jeans-clad Adonis moved amidst a lot of weighted silver pendulums that dangled from long lengths of nylon strings, resting inches above the floor. Traversing the area, himself a kind of human pinball, Labrenz sometimes launched
the weights in twirling mode, at other moments he contemplated their mere existence.I was told that at the two-hour mark, hot American coffee was brought to Labrenz (no Starbucks here; Venice won’t hear of it…), after which the dancer continued his bird-like prowl, investigating the body and the brick-walled space, while an ever-changing audience, who came and went at leisure, also roamed through the kinetic art. I popped in twice: first during the third hour, and again on another night near the beginning of his performance. On both occasions Labrenz remained unflappable and, in a surreal way, serene, no matter the sweltering summer heat.”
Oh, and while our hearts may still be in Venezia, click here to read our latest L.A. Times story (dateline, Venice, whee), on Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez, we’ve got the troupe’s upcoming gig at UCLA’s Royce Hall March 15-16 in our future. It’s the 25-year anniversary of Wim’s ground-shattering, What The Body Does Not Remember. We’ve got a feeling it will bring back a lot of memories. In the meantime, ain’t life grand!
