The warm-up exercises they do Luciano Rosso y Alfonso Baron while the audience is settling into the audience would be enough to send any average office worker to the hospital. But they are just the prelude to shocking physical display that will be seen during the next hour, a combination of courtship dance, danced combat, comic duel, sexual battle, comic acrobatics.
All that is A red poyoa work that changed – even among its performers: Barón replaced Nicolás Poggi – throughout its 15-year history, and which, with more than a thousand performances in 30 countries – according to the program at hand – fulfilled its creators’ expectations. the dream of making a living from their art: it was the passport that allowed them to settle in France.
As it lacks dialogue, has an austere staging and involves a limited technical team, it is ideal for touring festivals. Or to return, for a dozen functions, as now, to his country of origin. A bench, a wardrobe, a radio recorder: that’s all the scenery. But it is enough and more than enough thanks to the extraordinary ability of the two actors/dancers/athletes and the expertise of director Hermes Gaido to guide them.
It could be defined to A red poyo like the lysergic staging of an episode of Pepe Le Pew, the skunk in heat who harassed a desperate cat in the Warner Bros. cartoons. That is the dynamic that, with variations, is repeated on stage: the character de Rosso trying to seduce the Baron.
With this love affair in the background, between the two they set up acrobatic and dance duels in which these modern mountebanks show a incredible mastery of every muscle in the body. Literally: from the eyebrows to the big toe they have their moment of prominence in each of the crazy paintings. They leave almost no anatomical resources to use.
Thus, the two costume males are transformed into fighting cocks, deformed birds, threatening felines, crawling reptiles. Or in dancers beatboxreggaeton or cumbia. Always competing for the public’s attention, while maintaining the pendulum movement of towards/away from homoerotic flirting.
The radio recorder plays a key role: Rosso and Barón improvise from what they tune in – they assure that nothing is recorded, and we will have to believe them – on the AM and FM radios. A River goal, a Celine Dion song, a cosmetics advertisement or a paranormal sermon: any sound that comes out of the device serves to fuel the silent comedy.
Just in time, when a certain repetition of resources begins to be felt, the end arrives. But there is still one thing left: Rosso doing his big hit live, the viral playback of The piebald chick. Highway.
There are four performances of “Un poyo rojo” left at the Metropolitan (Av. Corrientes 1343). They will be next Tuesday (at 8 p.m.) and Wednesday (at 8 p.m.), and February 4 (at 8 p.m.) and 5 (at 10:30 p.m.) (from $22,500). On Friday the 31st and Saturday the 1st they will be free at 8pm at the Munro Cultural Center (Vélez Sársfield 4650, Vicente López).