Juana ficción (2024)
La Ribot returns to the figure of Juana I of Castilla in collaboration with the Spanish conductor Asier Puga, with original music by Iñaki Estrada.
Juana Ficción, more than the sublime testimony of a stolen life, is the grandiose gesture of a close collaboration between choreographer La Ribot and conductor Asier Puga. The scope of this work transcends both the physical space in which the piece takes place and the themes it addresses. An intoxicating and fragile concert that navigates between dance and music, light and darkness.
The movement of the sun and natural light, in a central scenography, make each performance unique. This narrative, led by La Ribot, in duet with Juan Loriente, is accompanied by an original composition by Iñaki Estrada for a contemporary music orchestra blending electronic sounds (Álvaro Martín co-creator) and ancient chants.
A sound and visual experience that reveals the destiny of Juana I of Castilla, a trapped modern woman whose impossible escape will inspire stories throughout history.
Crowned in 1504, imprisoned for life. A temporal eclipse that La Ribot seizes upon to recount in movement in an exceptional scenographic and solar cycle. Using a video from her 1991 show, El Triste que nunca os vido also referencing Juana, the piece captures the abyss of time and its imprint on the body. Juana ficción attempts to convey the queen’s mental universe, on the margins of the world.
A narrative suspended in time through music and dance, this piece carries with it the idea of an ephemeral present, of a passage from day to twilight, from splendor to oblivion.
Artistic and technical team
Artistic direction: La Ribot et Asier Puga
Choreography and staging: La Ribot
Dancers: Juan Loriente, La Ribot
Musical direction: Asier Puga
Arrangements, original composition and electronic music: Iñaki Estrada
Sound space and electronic music: Álvaro Martín
Grupo Enigma: Víctor Parra, violin, Xavier Olivar, alto, Zsolt G. Tottzer, cello, Fernando Gómez, flute, Emilio Ferrando, clarinet, Joan Germán Olivé, saxophone, Juan Carlos Segura, synthesizer
Polyphonic choir Schola Cantorum Paradisi Portae: Rubén Larrea Perálvarez, alto, Alberto Palacios Guardia, ténor, Marcos Castrillo Sampedro, tenor Alberto Cebolla Royo, baritone
Consultant in musicology: Alberto Cebolla
Dramaturgy: Jaime Conde Salazar
Lighting design: Éric Wurtz
Costume design: Elvira Grau
Costume making: Elvira Grau, Marion Schmid
Photo costume: Mateo Jobin
Technical direction: Marie Prédour
Executive production and distribution: Aude Martino
Communication and production: Juliette Henrioud
Visual Arts Management: Sandra Recio
Administration: Gonzague Bochud
Production: La Ribot Ensemble, Grupo Enigma
Coproduction: La Bâtie Festival de Genève, Centro de cultura contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid), Festival d’Avignon
With the support of the City of Geneva, the Canton of Geneva, Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council, La Corodis, Loterie Romande, Service Industriel de Genève, INAEM - Instituto nacional de las artes escénicas y de la musica, Gobierno de Aragón (Spain)
Residency L’Animal à l’esquena (Celrà, Spain)
Commentaries
16/09/2024
“La Ribot has returned to the figure of the comunera queen with Juana Ficción, and has done so alongside a longtime collaborator, performer Juan Loriente, and one of the iconoclasts of contemporary music, Asier Puga and his Enigma Ensemble.”
“This indispensable Juana Ficción reminded Madrid audiences that another kind of dance is possible […] In that dark courtyard, with the moon about to appear in the sky, while the audience was leaving the performance and Loriente remained beside the corpse of Juana I of Castile, Madrid dance once again found one of its hearts, now almost lost.”
El Diario.es, Pablo Caruana (critic) — Read the full review here.
05/07/2024
“Among the performances we have seen in Avignon […] the proposal by dancer La Ribot, accompanied by musician Asier Puga, stands out.”
“We will especially remember the great intelligence with which the artists make use of space and time: the solemnity of the columns, the massive trunks of the two immense plane trees. As night falls, the birds and the wind mingle with a carefully tuned musical accompaniment. Conductor Asier Puga, with the Zaragoza Chamber Orchestra and a small choir of four singers, leads a score that brilliantly combines Golden Age pieces with contemporary compositions by Iñaki Estrada.”
Libération, Lucile Commeaux (review) — You can read the full review here.
11/07/2024
“Described as a raw interpretation, Juana ficción is in fact rough, bitter, and infinitely opaque. A UFO that should be welcomed with open arms.”
“The first part is a game of waiting, with this wonderful vocal ensemble, a polyphonic choir, and the Zaragoza Chamber Orchestra. And conductor Asier Puga, dressed in a transparent tulle suit and futuristic glasses, contributes to the poetic radicalism of this overture. Interested in the contemporary expression of music, vocal, lyrical, and symphonic repertoires, he delivers a highly refined and sensitive interpretation—experimental Baroque music enhanced by the song of starlings.”
“Everything is meticulously timed to create the incredible visual effect of a body trapped in darkness, hidden from view. The body fades away, disappears, much like the existence of Jeanne, confined for 46 years in the darkness of an institution and in the twists and turns of history.”
“La Ribot and her accomplices shake us to draw beauty out of darkness, to extract flesh from the soul, to pay tribute to the dead through sounds of lyrical sublimation.
Juana, it is you!”
Ouvert aux Publics, Marie Anezin (review) — You can read the full review here.
09/07/2024
“And while our eyes are filled with powerful visions whose symbolism we try to decipher (nestled at the heart of the rupture of the sign, symbolon), our ears are filled with a torrent, an explosion of music, voices, and sound effects, from the contralto Ave Stella Maris to the clicking, murmuring, and snapping of tongues. The Zaragoza Chamber Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum Paradisi Portae, both sensational and masterfully conducted by Asier Puga, provide the musical and sonic foundations of this ‘saturated phenomenon,’ rife with symbolic killings.”
“As for Juana, she is at first nothing more than taffeta and delicacy, naked and clothed at the same time, revealing aged and vulnerable flesh, crowned with a transparent royal hood from which hangs, falling over her entire silhouette, the outline of a graceful face that appears only when one looks from the right angle. A perfect embodiment of Levinas’s notion of the face, resonating profoundly with the words of Ethics and Infinity (1982): ‘The skin of the face is that which remains most naked, most bare. The most naked, though decently naked. The most naked also: there is an essential poverty in the face. (...) The face is exposed, threatened, as if inviting us to an act of violence.’ The invitation will not be declined.”
“In Spanish, ficción can mean ‘fiction,’ but also ‘invention,’ or even ‘lie’… an ambiguity in the title of this musical and choreographic work that speaks volumes about La (Great) Ribot’s subtle approach to her subject, moving beyond its anecdotal dimension to embrace that terrible ‘lie’ between men and women—a lie that is sometimes fatal. Thirty years after her first work on the tragic fate of Queen Juana I of Castile, whom posterity nicknamed ‘Joanna the Mad,’ La Ribot returns to the subject masterfully, though not without unsettling her audience.”
“And while the beginning of the performance remains elusive, the end of the journey—absolutely astonishing—is less a matter of resolution than of annihilation. […] The spectator need only rise, cast one final voyeuristic glance at the wolf and its vanished prey, and walk away, from fiction into reality.”
Le Jour du Seigneur, brothers Thomas Carrique, Charles Desjobert, Thierry Hubert, and Rémy Valléjo — You can read the full review here.
Calendar
June 5–6, 2026 – Pavillon, La Commune (Aubervilliers-Paris, France)
December 15, 2025 – Europalia, Bozar (Brussels, Belgium)
October 8, 2025 - Palazzo Grassi (Venice)
June 26, 2025 – Festival Latitudes Contemporaines (Lille, France)
September 13–14, 2024 – Conde Duque Contemporary Culture Center (Madrid, Spain)
September 5–9, 2024 – La Bâtie Festival (Geneva, Switzerland)
July 3–7, 2024 – Festival d’Avignon (Avignon, France)