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The surreal McCoy
Dan Khoury portrays Salvador Dali in a one-man show that introduces us to the human side of the Spanish artist.
By ROBERT HICKS
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 3, 2002
[Publicity photo]
The actor Dan Khoury as Salvador Dali. “I wanted to focus on him as a person,” Khoury says of his portrayal.
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Most people think of Salvador Dali as the great but eccentric champion of surrealism.
Venue Theatre Collective's artistic director, Dan Khoury, sees a different side of the famous Spanish artist in his one-man show, Salvador Dali: Dream This, at Largo Cultural Center on Sunday and then the Salvador Dali Museum Oct. 11 to 13.
"I wanted to focus on him as a person," Khoury said. "As I put everything together, I tried to do it in a logical progression. I began with things that happened in his childhood."
Dali was the son of a prestigious notary public in the coastal town of Figueres. Although his father was a disciplinarian, his mother spoiled him and forgave his worst behavior. Those opposing forces, Khoury thinks, helped give rise to the sexual, religious, historical and scientific imagery in Dali's art and life.
Khoury also learned that Dali's brother died early in life, and that Dali was given his name and viewed almost as a replacement for the lost son.
"That really hit me between the eyes," said Khoury. Many of "Dali's thoughts appear to spring from his belief that he was a replacement for his dead brother."
On stage, Khoury depicts the artist talking about himself and his wife, Gala, looking back on his childhood, investigating his relationship with his parents, discussing his friendships with Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel. He tries to find the keys to understand his own art.
"I go into his fascination with Millet's Angelus, that painting of two peasants in a field. Dali painted that five or six times. He was very haunted by that," Khoury said.
Khoury also discovered Dali believed Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa revealed an Oedipus complex. Dali advocated Freudian psychology and he embraced scientific advances in molecular theory and DNA, all interests seen in his art.
Visitors to the Times Festival of Reading may know Khoury for his portrayals of authors Kahlil Gibran and Miguel de Cervantes. In 1999, Khoury got a call from the Treasure Island Art Guild, inviting him to portray an artist. After thinking for days, he decided to do a show about Dali.
"I'd like to say Dali came to me in a dream and said, 'You are the only person who can imitate me without being struck by lightning,' but it was a little more prosaic than that," he said.
Having performed as French composer Erik Satie with composer A. Paul Johnson in their two-man show Memoirs of an Amnesiac in 1997 at the Dali Museum, Khoury contacted Peter Tush, the museum's curator of education, with his idea.
"Tush opened up the library and the research materials and was very helpful," Khoury said. "The show wouldn't exist in the form it does now without his help."
A 2001 Artist Resource Fund grant from the Pinellas County Arts Council further assisted his efforts to premiere his Dali show last February at the Palladium in St. Petersburg.
Khoury read biographies of Dali, commentaries, art books, Dali's own writings and viewed film by and about Dali, culling it all into his own vision.
"I really worked at trying to understand Dali through his own words," he said. "Does his work mean something, and if it does, how does it look to him, and how did he get to that point?"
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PREVIEW: Salvador Dali: Dream This, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday at Largo Cultural Center, 105 Central Park Drive, (727) 587-6793. Also 8 p.m. Oct. 11-12 and 2 p.m. Oct. 13 at Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, (727) 823-3767. Tickets $8-$10.
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