Saving Salvador – A dream of dance in Innsbruck

As part of the third Innsbruck Winter Dance Festival, this time the Limonada Dance Company conjured up none other than the great dreamer Salvador Dali himself on the large congress stage. A fantastic dance piece between trauma and transformation - which does not explain the eccentric surrealist in great detail, but makes his stories and images an impressive experience. So good, in fact, that the Catalan master choreographer Enrique Gasa Valga himself slipped into the double role of Dali.

The very beginning of the play is the end, because the young Salvador Dali (initially just a Dali-esque egg) doesn't even want to be born. Instead, death enters the stage of the small Catalan village of Figueres, the tired nurse knows him well, but the young parents are deeply affected by the loss of their first child. The parents name their second son Salvador, just like the first. The dancing reincarnation bursts a floating amniotic sac, there he stands, the young Dali, and the surreal takes its course.(Here is the Dali work for the danced scene.) Between the two revolving and changing stage elements, a four-piece music ensemble accompanies the story, carried by Greta Macolongo with her powerful voice and in three languages.

The next surprise follows immediately, as dance maestro Enrique Gasa Valga (also Catalan) mimes the old Dali himself - as a dreamlike vision of the future, who himself pulls the strings of his naked, newborn soul and thus shapes the eccentric artist. The boy (superbly danced by Simone Centonze) receives rebuke and severity from his father, but his mother's last gifts to her beloved son are the insignia of a king - then death enters the stage again, this time for the last dance with his mother. The iconic figure with the pointed moustache finally rises from the abyss of grief. In the following dream sequence, the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud steps down from his golden throne for a pas-de-deux (couple dance in ballet) - an encounter that was to have a decisive influence on Dali's artistic expression.

The young artist wakes up on the train to Madrid, where he soon meets the filmmaker Bunuel and the poet Lorca among his fellow students - and probably also falls in love with the latter a little. However, when Lorca joined the traditionalists, the relationship changed, the conflict escalated and Dali was expelled from art school.

Back in Figueres with his disappointed father, the great painter Juan Mirò takes care of the young artist and takes him to Paris in the Roaring Twenties. Dali is fascinated by the freedom, the bold women and the contrast to Catalan Catholicism - and even finds his singing voice in the following French duet. (At this point, applause once again for Simone Centonze, who can dance as beautifully as he can sing) The Parisian writer André Breton welcomes the painter into his surrealist movement, Salvador Dali gets to know his artistic persona - and also Gala, who later becomes his wife, muse and manager. While a new war flares up on the streets of the city, the two indulge in their obsessive love story.

The Limonada ensemble around Enrique Gasa Valga knows how to enchant audiences like no other. For fourteen years, the master choreographer was the widely appreciated dancing leg of the Tiroler Landestheater. He now tours the country and the world with the Limonada Dance Company with changing - and recurring! - pieces around the country and the world. One of the last dance pieces in Saving Salvador is (perhaps for this very reason) dedicated to Dali's most famous work: "The Persistence of Memory", the melting clocks, tick-tack-tick-tack, danced by the old Dali and Gasa Valga himself.

Not only once do I think I see a mischievous grin behind the great master's pointed moustache. Like when he stalked across the stage on stilts and with an overlong walking stick. When the artist finally arranges the last stage set and Gasa Valga puts down his brush, the play is complete, the two Catalans have merged into one and fantasies have become reality before our eyes. We spend the final applause standing until our hands hurt.

In mid-March, the Limonada Dance Company can be seen in Spain with "El Gran Gatsby", while "Dorian Gray" will be performed again in Munich in May. Fortunately, the next winter and the next Innsbruck Winter Dance Festival are already quite fixed. If you want to pass the time until the 2027 schedule by trying your hand at the ballet barre, you can do so at the Tanzacademy in Innsbruck, for example. Those who prefer to grow a funny beard: Dali swore by Hungarian beard wax from the French brand Pinaud - or his sticky fingers after eating dates.

Photos: Peter Koren captured the dress rehearsal and premiere of Saving Salvador in pictures and made them available for this article.