Finding Dali In The Gentle Caress Of Theatre

When everything has been done before, you may as well invent a new form. To some extent this is what Switzerland's Compagnia Finzi Pasca have tried to do, fusing drama, dance and circus with art, adultery and a style they like to call 'theatre of the caress'. It's an acrobatic feat of creative re-imagining, and its flower, La Verita, will doubtless be one of the highlights of January's Sydney Festival programme.

Back in 2011, the internationally revered writer/director Daniele Finzi Pasca and his longtime collaborators, including composer/choreographer Maria Bonzanigo, gelled two companies together to form Compagnia Finzi Pasca and, inspired by the legendary surrealist Salvador Dali, created La Verita.

"It's a way to try to become a dreamer for the public, to take them by the hand and go together into a story in a way that is like conducting them into a forest."

Speaking from Napoli where she is working on a new staging of Bizet's Carmen, Bonzanigo begins by explaining the company's trademark 'theatre of the caress'. "It's a way to try to become a dreamer for the public," she says, "to take them by the hand and go together into a story in a way that is like conducting them into a forest."

The result, much like a caress, is light. Subtle. Beautiful. However, as Bonzanigo insists, "It's not that it's light all the time; it can be strong and acrobatic but also it has the capacity to adapt to the sensibility of each person in the audience."

If it's all starting to sound like heady European conceptual art, recall too that La Verita was inspired by a rediscovered Dali. "He painted this big drop in 1944 in New York for a ballet, Mad Tristan. We don't know a lot about this ballet, but we know that Coco Chanel had drawn designs for the costumes and that Dali was planning to use the music of Cole Porter and Wagner, but we've tried not to tell the biography of Dali or to recreate the ballet."

The backdrop was unearthed at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. The drop was inspired by the medieval Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, in which a knight charged with bringing back a prized Irish beauty for his king to wed ingests a love potion with said girl, after which they embark on a classically doomed affair. Ever since its popularisation in the 20th century, the tale has been told over and over and is now considered one of the foundation stones of the Romantic tradition.

According to La Verita's composer/choreographer Maria Bonzanigo, "We are trying to understand what was this pain that Dali had, but we tell this in a way that is not so full of dolour. We are more like an observer in this. But also, we are interested in why he wanted to tell the story of Tristan and Isolde."

Yet, as the title suggests, La Verita is also concerned with truth. "We speak about the truth of the theatre, not the absolute truth," Bonzanigo points out. "When we are on stage we want to make something that appears like truth but we know it's not truth most of the time. We play with that in a humorous way; that something is true on stage but actually it's not true."

La Verita is a genuinely postmodern stage amalgam, a crash of spectacle, art and tragic love that laughs gently at itself and acknowledges its own invention. Now that's a caress.