Fuerzabruta
Roundhouse, London

Emily Berry
posted 19 June 2006

Fuerzabruta ('brute force'), directed by Diqui James, is the show reopening the Roundhouse after its 10 year closure. Put together by the people behind Argentinian dance company De La Guarda, this hour-long performance is definitely more dance than theatre, shrugging off the constraints of such stuck-in-the-mud devices as narrative, and presenting the audience with spectacle after striking spectacle.

Standing in the Roundhouse's newly refurbished, circular space, which is complete with a bar, but devoid of seating, the audience presses forwards clutching plastic pints expectantly like people waiting for the opening song at a gig. An electronic voice advises us where the fire exits are, and to move around the venue when requested to do so, for our own safety and that of the performers. It seems like a threat.

Eventually a reddish glow picks out a fraught-looking man entering on a treadmill; he is harnessed to the ceiling, marching resolutely forwards yet travelling backwards to a thumping party soundtrack. As his pace increases to a frantic angular run, other people appear, pass him, and fall rigidly off the edge. Walls speed towards him, which he breaks through, still running. He is eventually felled by a gunshot, a bloody explosion bursting from his padded white costume; but he later reappears to repeat his seemingly doomed escape several times.

While Fuerzabruta has no storyline to speak of, certain ideas and themes do recur throughout the play, depicting life as a lonely, relentless pursuit without an object, enlivened by moments of exhilarated togetherness and abandon. In the play's most compelling scene, a huge, see-through-bottomed tank descends from the ceiling. As water seeps into it from the sides, semi-clad girls slip and slide on its surface like otters, gliding together and apart in playful, strangely beautiful sequences. Gradually the tank is lowered until it is just an inch above the heads of those in the front part of the audience; those at the back, feeling both left out and relieved, are confronted with a sea of hands lifted, ever so tentatively, to touch the surface above, and the hands of the dancers responding in mutual exploration. Even from a distance this is a profoundly intimate moment. The tank ascends again and the tempo builds, water showering from above, dampening some of the audience, and drenching the performers, who begin to stomp on the plastic floor of the tank, whooping and thrashing in a kind of tribal rain dance. As the light dims gradually only the soles of their feet pressed to the floor are visible from below.

It could be argued that the play is made up of little more than gratuitous spectacle, and the price of the tickets certainly reflects the costs involved in building such a 'health and safety'-defying set. Following the contemporary fashion for diminishing the space between audience and performers to uncomfortable effect, as in similar recent shows such as Tropicana, Fuerzabruta frightens as much as it entertains. But after an hour of gazing upwards, open-mouthed, trying to keep one eye on the green glow of the fire escape, even the wow factor begins to seem profound.

Till 30 July 2006.