The Rules Don’t Matter With This Troupe Either

A show from Argentina by way of New York is putting a new spin on this city’s reputation for being over the top.

To a large degree, De La Guarda’s “Villa Villa,” at the Rio Resort in Las Vegas and at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York, takes place over your head. Using rock-climbing ropes, actors fly from one side of the warehouse-like space to the other, occasionally dropping into an audience that is standing, dancing or being forcibly moved.

“We thought, in a way, like we were the audience,” says Pichon Baldinu, who launched the De La Guarda troupe in 1993 with Diqui James and composer Gaby Kerpel. “We wanted a show where you can feel you are really involved, where there’s no place without action, without moving. It’s really a party where people can forget that they came to see a theater piece; and they can feel free and can talk, move, shout.”

De La Guarda is not only pushing the boundaries of Las Vegas entertainment, but also traditional theater--and that’s exactly the intent.

“Villa Villa” has been likened to a cross between Cirque du Soleil and a mosh pit. It has no plot or discernible dialogue. Is the man on the platform who’s yelling in an undecipherable language a dictator or a spurned lover? Two girls run back and forth across a wall. Are they chasing each other or is it some representation of the urban rat race?

“It’s not really important to fix a meaning,” Baldinu says.

Indeed, the audience comes up with its own interpretations.

“I like very much when I hear different stories about the same part of the show,” James, 35, says in a phone interview from Buenos Aires. “I like when they really believe in that story.”

And then there’s the music, both recorded and live, which ranges from subdued rain-forest sounds to chants, drumming and dance music. One New York reviewer suggested earplugs.

“We tried to get the tribal aspect of the human being,” says Kerpel, 36. “That’s why we have a lot of percussion and voices. On the other hand, the parts that play live are played by the performers; this aspect of the music is very primal.”

Elements are also taken from Argentine folk music: “Actually it’s very close to African music,” Kerpel says by phone from Buenos Aires.

All of this makes De La Guarda (the name is a take on “guardian angel” in Spanish) a little hard to explain to your average musical theater aficionado. A show in which the audience members go through a storm, get wet and, for a lucky few, are lifted into the air, is clearly seeking a different demographic.

It is also the reason De La Guarda has relied on word-of-mouth for its success in New York, where it opened off-Broadway in 1998.

“Clearly this is a show that was made for a younger person,” says Jeffrey Seller, one of the producers of “Rent,” who helped bring De La Guarda to the United States. “And for a person who’s looking for a more visceral, more physical, more active experience.”

“Rent” brought in on average the youngest audience since records were kept for Broadway shows, says Seller, 36.

“ ‘Rent’ is breaking the rules of musical theater,” Seller says. “This is breaking the rules of theater.”

It took a while for De La Guarda to take off in New York, but it could take even longer in Las Vegas. People expecting the fixed smile of a showgirl will be a bit discombobulated when a De La Guarda cast member approaches them semi-crouched with a feral expression on her face. And those wanting sequins and spandex might not be ready for the thrift-store business suits that cast members wear.

Everyone associated with the show points out that, because the show is hard to describe, it took a while for De La Guarda to hit its stride in New York. But there’s a clear feeling that the box office in Las Vegas, where it opened in October, has been disappointing.

“We found that with the show in New York, it took us six months to gain enough momentum to really start to sell tickets on a consistent basis,” says Stephen Paladie, the general manager who was with the show in New York and is now in Las Vegas. “We’ve been performing 12 or 14 weeks [in Las Vegas]. We are adapting to our new environment.”

The transient nature of Las Vegas audiences could stretch out that six-month period. “It’s more complicated because in New York you can create the word of mouth; there are a lot of people living there,” Baldinu says. “It is creating a new experience and, as always, new experiences take longer to become popular.”

Still, both Baldinu and James delight in the idea of Las Vegas as a venue for De La Guarda.

“People that go there want to be surprised,” James says. “They want to find that crazy city that everybody talks about.”

Baldinu is more direct: “I’m very excited about being there and seeing how the show works. People that go there to have this experience of having one week of being out of the real world--it’s like a Disneyland for adults. It’s good for us to see the show working and playing with people in that situation.”

De La Guarda is also the kind of show that the casinos are hoping will attract younger crowds.

“That’s why we’re here,” says Paladie, 33, who, like much of the company, reflects the demographic the hotels are looking for. “That’s why Blue Man is in town, even [Cirque du Soleil’s] ‘O’ to a certain extent. They see a need to appeal to a new group of people. The older people are coming anyway. Blue Man is edgy, but it’s not completely out there; I think we are as far out there as anyone has yet gone.”

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De La Guarda’s journey to that glitzy American fantasy land was by no means short, or easy.

Baldinu and James met as theater students in Buenos Aires in the mid-’80s, shortly after the end of the military junta that had ruled Argentina since 1976. Under that dictatorship, thousands of civilians “disappeared.” In 1985, two years into the democratic rule, the two left school to join La Organizacion Negra, a street-theater group that had, Baldinu says, “a violent aesthetic, a post-nuclear aesthetic. The action was violent and very dark.”

“We had been so many years under the dictatorship and all that violence,” James says. “We grew up with that, so that was the energy we had when we were 19, 20 years old.”

La Organizacion Negra performed “in underground places, with underground people,” Baldinu says. “We wanted to shock the audience; we wanted to make them be involved in the action and the images.”

“It was quite illegal,” James says. “We’d perform, and then we’d have to run away.”

But it was not strictly political theater. “We always tried to be more abstract, not like a political speech,” James says. “We had a lot of political theater at the beginning of the democracy. It was quite boring. We said, ‘Let’s make theater, let’s make something real, something strong.’ ”

After nine years with that group, Baldinu, James and Kerpel started looking for something different. “After all that, we said we needed more life, more poetry,” Baldinu says. “We need a more positive way of seeing life. . . . We starting thinking about ways we could provoke strong feelings in the audience without being violent.”

The ropes came in when they got together with rock climbers. “We started to really think of a box where we can use the whole space, where you can feel the energy everywhere” James says. “So the idea of using the air was perfect for that. In this box, you don’t know what is up, what is down, what is the wall, what is the floor.”

They learned how to safely use the ropes and started doing pieces of what would become “Villa Villa” at a Buenos Aires rock club. “We started to study the physics,” James says. “If I jump from here and you jump from there, what happens in the middle? Which motor do we need to move someone at a certain speed?

“From the beginning, we didn’t care if you saw the rope or not,” he continued. “We didn’t use it like a trick, we used it like a material. We wanted to do it as if anybody can do this. You have to be crazy, you have to have a little fantasy and you can do it.”

But there was little money. A villa is the Argentine word for a shantytown, and to do something villa villa means to make do with whatever is at hand.

“We started joking with that at the beginning,” James says. “We’d start thinking of an idea, but we knew we didn’t have the money to do it. And we’d say let’s do it villa villa.”

In 1995, De La Guarda put up a tent at Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires for “Villa Villa.” From there, the troupe toured Europe and appeared at a festival in Montreal.

In 1998, Seller, along with “Rent co-producers Kevin McCollum and David Binder, brought “Villa Villa” to New York.

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The planned spring opening of “Villa Villa” in Las Vegas last year was delayed by about five months. The Rio was building a semi-permanent structure to house the show, but the space was unusual enough for building inspectors to demand changes. “It was a constant struggle to meet the requirements of Clark County,” general manager Paladie says.

In October, the show finally premiered with a cast from the productions in New York and London, where “Villa Villa” opened in May 1999 and ran for a year. There are seven men and seven women in the show, but “we can do the show with as few as four [of each] or with all seven,” says Brendan Turk, 29, the stage manager who came from the New York production.

And the size of the cast changes in this physically demanding show. “That’s why there’s 14 people in the cast--because people are often injured,” says Simone Jenkinson, a 24-year-old actress from Northern England. “You’ve got a completely different relationship with your body.”

But the actors also love the freedom the show gives them. “You can change your character every night if you want to,” says Gian Sessarego, 29, an actor from Italy who was part of the London cast. “It’s not a script. You really use your feelings inside. For an actor, this is the best.”

The company has, in a way, formed its own little community in Las Vegas, Paladie says.

“This is kind of like a tour [company] in that, with the exception of a couple of crew members, everyone is pretty much from out of town,” he says. “So a lot of us don’t have a lot of contact with the real world; which is strange because I don’t see Las Vegas as being the real world either. It’s almost like you’re twice removed.”

Or, as show’s 28-year-old company manager, Frank Buckley, says: “We have this strange little animal in this strange new place.”