Fuerza Bruta is staged in a gutted bank (the Daryl Roth Theatre). It produces a series of striking visual, auditory and tactile images impressions. The audience stands in the large space (it’s a gutted bank) with plenty of room to walk through the crowd for a new perspective. Sometimes they’re herded about to make way for one of some enormous, short-lived installation.
At one point, a actor runs on a treadmill that spans the breadth of the space. This nameless character in the white suit and the serious expression has extraordinary single-mindedness. He bats aside the furniture that rides toward him on the rubber surface, determined to get somewhere he’s not going. He’s floats soars through the air, his legs in running mode, when a wall obstructs him, he bursts through it.
We’re never told what’s on the other side of the metaphor, but we can guess.
At another point, a transparent ceiling is lowered. It’s covered with water (i.e. on the top). Actresses swim/crawl on it, clinging to it, peering at us, as we are at them. It seems we’re both oddities. We put up out hands to touch the transparency, mirroring the forms of their hands pressed against it.
There are intermittent bursts of paper showers – and sometimes water showers – on the cast and us.
What with this environmental deluge, the exciting music, and the dramatic lighting that fills the space/building, by the show’s close the audience is in free-form movement, dancing like in a rave.
Fuerza Bruta engages us in a way that film and television never can. And so it points the way to a theatre for our century. Our theatre mustn’t try to rival the prosaic realism of media. This show stresses its presence, and so ours.
Fuerza Bruta (Look Up) was developed by Diqui James, in Buenos Aries, where it’s running simultaneously. It’s been playing in New York for two years, and we hope it will continue for at least as long.
