London.

FUERZABRUTA

The Roundhouse Chalk Farm Road NW1 8EH To 26 January 2013.
Tue-Wed 8pm.
Thu-Sat 7pm & 10pm.
Sun 5pm & 8pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.

RICKETS: 0844 482 8008.
www.roundhouse.org/fuerzabrata
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 January.

Spectacular spectacle and parade of skills.
This Argentinian show and Camden’s Roundhouse seem made for each other. Partly, the brute force of FuerzaBruta is a testimony to man-made plastics as actors swing and swim through the air dependent on them. The Roundhouse supplies space: lots of it, high into the air, where much of Fuerzabruta happens.

And it touches on a number of Roundhouse traditions, mixing circus, concert, drama and spectacular. It’s doubtless the last which makes most immediate impact, bringing out the ‘phone-cameras in the hope of retaining the live instant in miniature.

Each section makes its own statement, every statement big and loud, like the dancing, singing, percussive band one side or the player giving the biggest musical outing to car horns since Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre.

There’s something rock-operatic here too. And a circus/variety enthusiasm for human skill and daring. Walking in the air’s tame beside the woman who races, feet flailing space as if it’s a pathway, as she’s flung in a huge aerial circle. Or the running man climbing a staircase and flinging himself down as a vertical wall of boxes – not the first or second he’s crashed through – hurtles towards him.

Aquatic scenes start high then descend to within reach of audience fingertips, as performers dash and splash above a translucent floor. Later, the whole audience is covered by such a floor, with holes through which hands appear or figures are raised to take part in a dance.

Of course, it’s standing-room only: but to sit it out would be to miss the visceral reaction that completes the performance. And, as figures hurtle or run or bash away at opposite sides of a huge tinfoil screen way up high, there is a sense of the difficulty of making, or keeping contact, of the need to escape, be somewhere else. It’s most evident in the running man, dowsed with water (quite a lot of that spraying about), repeatedly shot, then reviving, removing his bloodstained shirt to reveal a clean one beneath, and running desperately on against objects and people; humans can be as enduring as man-made fibres are durable.

Performers: Martin Buzzo, Marcelo Curotti, Luciano Correa, Bruno Lopez Aragon, Debora Torres, Mariana Banfi, Estefania Bavassi, Natalia Gomez Carrillo, Jimena Abente Gaydou, Dana Ingrid Helber, Aria Van Domselaar, Melina Seoane, Gabriel Ostertag.

Director: Diqui James.
Composer/Musical Director: Gaby Kerpel.
Technical Director: AlejandroGarcia.

2013-01-03 13:04:08