By unravelling scenes and resetting them in Wales, Eddie Ladd takes Tony Montana on a warped road trip.

A PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presentation. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Friday, January 19. No remaining performances.

How big a follower of Brian De Palma’s cult-trash epic Scarface do you have to be to get Welsh performer Eddie Ladd’s wildly abstracted take on the movie? Well, a passing familiarity with Cuban-American coke kingpin Tony Montana and an ability to quote lines like “Say hello to my leetle frien’?” and “We bury those cock-a-roaches” are a start. But if you know who supporting character Frank Lopez is, can easily recall the scene in which he pleads for his life, and can then make the leap from him doing so in a gaudy ’80s-Miami office to a sedate Welsh country house, you’ll understand all the dimensions of her extended inside joke. Thanks to a renewed interest in the film driven by endless homages by everyone from G-Unit to Xbox, there were plenty who got it at Ladd’s genre-busting PuSh International Performing Arts Festival appearance.

That knowledge is crucial because Ladd so thoroughly deconstructs the story, moving all the settings to Wales. The stage is split into two spheres of performance. On one side is the petite, pixie-haired artist, dancing and mugging in front of a camera, with a blue screen as her backdrop. On her right are the projected video images of her antics, where she’s chroma-keyed into scenes of the serene Welsh countryside and her elderly parents’ rural house, a mishmash of chintz wallpaper, floral carpets, and porcelain figurines that looks straight out of the hit Brit home show How Not to Decorate. The messages are multitudinous. For a start, the split stage emphasizes how an actor performs for the camera, the way she jumps in and out of the frame and moves in for an extreme, cropped close-up. With the Welsh setting, Ladd loosely connects the cultural imperialism her homeland faces from the British with that faced by Cubans in America.

What’s refreshing is that Ladd never resorts to literal reenactments of the film. Key plot points are explained in untranslated Welsh or choreographed through action: she dances the chaos of the infamous chainsaw-torture scene in front of incongruous footage of her parents’ kitschy china cabinet; the end’s extended shootout is a frenzy of airborne leaps and dives Ladd performs suspended on a harness with pulleys. Postmodern as it all is, Y Tystion’s thumping electronic score adds a hip, clubby feel that keeps Scarface from sailing too far into the avant-garde. Ladd’s grooving, kicking choreography, punctuated by her arms and legs slicing the air, owes much more to the Irvine Welsh–era rave scene than the technique of contemporary dance.

The bizarre blend of elements helps make Scarface just the kind of warped, uncategorizable gem you hope to find at PuSh. As Tony Montana himself might say, “She got da stuff!”