The Spanish soloist La Ribot has presented most of her shows on conventional stages but for her current project, Still Distinguished, she has transferred to gallery spaces. The move brings with it a different way of looking, a different relationship with her audience, and it makes much better sense of her material. In the theatre, I saw the witty but narcissistic contrivances of a dancer who was very good at taking off her clothes. What I saw in the South London Gallery was an artist using her naked body to project a range of deft visual conceits, and to pack a concentrated lesson in how we look at bodies, at women and at other people.
Not that La Ribot is denying her dance background. Few women without serious training could be so pragmatic about stripping naked so close to a bunch of strangers. And the curiously ageless La Ribot, with her slightly worn face and girlish slenderness, has the kind of body that doesn't blush under the most fascistic or voyeuristic gaze.
The first piece, Pa amb tomaquet, is a video depicting a bizarre rite of preparation. La Ribot crumbles up a garlic clove and scrubs it vigorously over her body. She then smears on ripe tomatoes, and finally gives herself a thorough drizzling of olive oil. It's a fusion of cookery, ablution and erotic foreplay which becomes a joke about women getting ready for consumption, but it also primes us for the see-sawing relationship we develop with La Ribot during her live show, a relationship both intimate and neutral.
When she takes off her clothes during the next piece, she lays them out on the floor, along with several assorted objects, in precise order of size. The mix of striptease and task is perfectly judged - La Ribot allows us to stare at her breasts, genitals and skin, but her efficient activity flatly defuses any sexual charge.
Frequently, she allows herself to look vulnerable, even grotesque. In Outsized Baggage she ties herself tightly with cord - a female parcel packed for air freight - and the rope makes her flesh redden and bulge. Later she binds her joints with wooden splints to become a stiff parody of a ballerina. Yet her fine concentration allows her to retain magisterial control of her effects, and of us.
We follow her obediently around the gallery and respond with almost childlike promptness to her cues - grinning as she smiles at us, feeling collective emotions of shock, scepticism, interest.In her final piece, having drunk a litre of water, La Ribot wraps herself in foil and lies on the floor. We all, simultaneously, wonder if she's going to pee. By the time we realise she isn't, we're all thinking that it wouldn't be such a big deal if she did.
La Ribot's use of herself as prime material and the potentially confrontational nature of her approach suggest easy comparisms with Tracey Emin. Actually, the discipline she brings to her performance and the meticulousness with which she thinks through her ideas leave Emin floundering.
Until Sunday. Box office: 0870 840 1961.
