Gustavia - Mathilde Monnier & La Ribot, Chaillot Théâtre National de la Danse, Paris

Mathilde Monnier & La Ribot. Gustavia. Nearly 20 years after its creation, choreographers La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier revive their iconic piece Gustavia.

A biting, funny, hard-hitting duo inspired by burlesque, whose renewed relevance today, in the wake of a resurgent feminist movement, highlights its vitality, its pertinence and its cheek.

Amid a profusion of black velvet, from the margins of the stage to the floor, La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier — in black leotards and shoes as well — perform a burlesque number where expended energy, repetition and accident create an irresistible comic tension — somewhere between a knee striptease and a verbal outpouring.

With its techniques of reversal, the sudden blow and the dodge, classic burlesque is the art of turning incompetence into competence.

That is precisely the path Gustavia follows, the fake stage name of a woman trying to talk about big subjects beyond her and about her trade as an artist.

With Gustavia, the two choreographers evoke both contemporary art and their own way of working, in a piece that the years have loaded with new meaning.

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

Their choreographic practices share, among other things, a habit of borrowing vocabulary from other art forms, starting with theatre. They revive the piece today in light of the feminist movements that have emerged since.

With this feminist statement, they offer a new interpretation, darker, funnier and more hard-hitting, of two free women facing the world and its violence with humour and poetry. Vincent Théval. Type: Dance / Theatre. Duration: 1h. Accessible-seating bookings: 01 53 65 30 00