Jean-Philippe Cuerrier and Erika Bettin perform an acrobatic pas de deux in LA VERITÀ (photo by Max Gordon)
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
May 4-7, $25-$80
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
finzipasca.com
Compagnia Finzi Pasca returns to BAM with La Verità, a wild and wacky production worthy of its inspiration, Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. Previously at BAM in November 2012 with Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, the Swiss troupe created La Verità around the large-scale backdrop Dalí painted for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1944 ballet, Mad Tristan, which was offered to them three years ago by its owner. (The original is now being restored, so a replica is being used in its place.) The two-hour show is a broad mix of elements that recall Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Cirque du Soleil, Eugene Ionesco, Fuerza Bruta, STREB, and vaudeville, having a ton of fun with aerialists, juggling, acrobatics, roller skating, Bunraku puppetry, and clowns. Writer, director, and co-lighting designer and choreographer Daniele Finzi Pasca incorporates images from the mural into the show, including a wheelbarrow, dandelions, crutches, and eggs with absurdist glee while displaying the many talents of the twelve-member cast, consisting of Moira Albertalli, Jean-Philippe Cuerrier, Annie-Kim Déry, Stéphane Gentilini, Andrée-Anne Gingras-Roy, Erika Bettin, Francesco Lanciotti, Evelyne Laforest, David Menes, Marco Paoletti, Felix Salas, Beatriz Sayad, and Rolando Tarquini. A bare-chested Cuerrier shows remarkable strength holding up Bettin by the foot with his hand, Salas contorts his body into mind-blowing positions, a rhino-headed performer plays the piano, Menes dances en pointe, ballerinas with dandelion headdresses stumble about (on purpose), and various men and women lie down under the treacherous Zig Roller. Tarquini and Sayad also impress in a tour-de-force costume-changing bit. There’s not much of a narrative plot; it seems to essentially be about an upcoming auction to help the theater, but it’s often hard to understand Tarquini because of his thick accent. But La Verità is essentially just about the chaotic craziness of Dalí’s bigger-than-life persona, in a dreamlike world that melds the real with the surreal.