PASTA E LAVA is brought to us as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival and is part of the Global Fringe Gala Week 1.
The company is called My Homeless Lover and combines Hawaiian and Italian influences – the performers are Eddie Bruno Oroyan and . It was filmed in Genova in 2018 by Danny Willems.
It is a strange, unsettling, somewhat uneven combination of tenderness and violence, a blend of food, masks, mime , Butoh, allusions to Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, other contemporary dance and acrobatics fused with haunted memories.
There are hot and sweaty intimate enfoldings as well as short, shuffling quick steps, slo mo movement and angular, jerky choreography. Animal like movements ( dog and chicken for example) are also included.
It is a constant experiment of the cycle of destruction and rebuilding and examines love, death, irrationality and renewal, struggle and opposition . Are the two performers trapped in a violent relationship? Or a tender one ?
It opens with a somewhat extended scene between a couple, who collect lumps of pasta off the floor. The two then remove their heavy outer layers to reveal they are wearing pasta worn as protective shields ( that looks like foam rubber) under plastic.
The pasta is used and transformed throughout the show becoming wigs , long stretched and spaghetti like and many other things , especially masks.
The cast take on many different characters, morphed by the restrictive pasta masks and the heavy plastic used over their faces. It has an atmosphere of experimentation, of cabaret, of confrontation (at one point Enes is right at the edge of the stage and accosts the audience) , and there is resistance and opposition in the volcanic relationship between Oroyan and Enes at times, which at one point becomes like a boxing match with the pasta as gloves.
Throughout the show there is a white blank portrait bust on a small round table that becomes a base for pasta wigs and is later used for the final tender ghostly scene. ( At a café, a reunion between lost lovers ) .
The pasta and lava metaphor is established, but not really taken and developed to the full extent that it perhaps could have been.
Running time- an hour.
‘Pasta e Lava ‘ screens as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival 17-20 September 2020.
https://sydneyfringe.com/events/pasta-e-lava/