Gustavia de Mathilde Monnier & La Ribot

Nearly 20 years after its creation, choreographers La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier revive their iconic piece *Gustavia* at Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse. This biting, funny, and sharp duo draws from burlesque, with the renewal of feminist movements now highlighting its liveliness, relevance, and impertinence.

In a profusion of black velvet, from the margins of the stage to the floor, La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier – in black leotards and shoes – engage in a burlesque number where energy expenditure, repetition, and accident create an irresistible comic tension, between a knee strip-tease and verbal logorrhea. Using techniques of reversal, blow, and dodge, classical burlesque transforms incompetence into competence – a path followed by Gustavia, the false stage name of a woman trying to speak about great subjects beyond her and her work as an artist.

With *Gustavia*, the two choreographers evoke both contemporary art and their way of working, in a piece that the years have charged with new meaning. Created in 2008 at the Montpellier Danse festival, they reactivate it today in light of feminist movements like #MeToo, offering a new interpretation that is even darker, funnier, and more striking – a feminine plea of two free women facing the world and violence with humor and poetry.