Much more is gained than lost in the translations that take place during Eddie Ladd’s multidisciplinary, multilingual dance piece Scarface, slated for the Scotiabank Dance Centre on January 19 and 20 as part of this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. In a personalized homage to Brian de Palma’s trashy 1983 gangster flick, the solo show draws on elements of Al Pacino’s over-the-top portrayal of Cuban thug Tony Montana, turning them into fierce on-stage movements that the slight, grey-suited Welsh dancer performs in front of a chroma-keyed blue screen. Captured by a video camera, the live images of Ladd are then relayed onto a large, adjacent projection screen, where they’re blended with background footage, much of it depicting Welsh houses and countryside.

With the setting shifted from Florida to Great Britain, and the medium from projected image to dance and back again, Ladd’s Scarface is a web of adaptations and transpositions. But the leaps between source material and final product, Ladd says, are easier and more natural than they might seem.

“Al Pacino was fantastic in the film—so choreographic, extremely aware of his physicality,” she explains when the Straight reaches her at home in Aberporth, Wales, her rich voice often warmed by an easy laugh—the polar opposite of Tony Montana’s vicious bragging. “I’ve never really been sure of what my dance style is because I was not trained as a dancer, and so I’ve always been looking around for a vocabulary. So I suppose it helped my vocabulary as much as me thinking ”˜Oh, this suits my style,’ you know. It made me think ”˜Can you take stuff from film to make dance?’”

Translation in the literal sense is at work here, too. Excerpts from the film’s expletive-pocked script (“You fuck with me, you fuckin’ with the best!”) accompany Ladd’s performance, helping build her version of the archetypal rise-and-fall narrative of the gangster movie; some of these lines are in the original English while others are rendered into Welsh. According to Ladd, it all reinforces one of the main themes of the piece—the “self-loathing” that crops up in smaller cultures that have been overrun by much larger ones from next door, such as the Welsh one that has for centuries been overrun by the English.

“One of the primary things that drew me to the film was simply that they [the main characters] leave Cuba, they drop Spanish, they start talking English, they really get to grips with the brave new world that they’re trying to work themselves into,” Ladd said. “For us as Welsh people, joining the British state meant dropping Welsh completely, and it meant trying to integrate yourself entirely and forget things about yourself. So Scarface is a great big metaphor for that, as well.”

Ironically, Hollywood film is often accused of spreading a form of imperialism around the globe, eroding the world’s more fragile communal identities. Yet Ladd has turned to it here as a response to the pressures undermining Welsh culture. This was simply a matter, apparently, of finding within it her own language, for both body and voice.