Call it theater of the surreal – Fuerza Bruta comes to opera house
Call it theater of the surreal, made spectacularly and disorientingly real: women romping overhead in a pool of water; a man on a treadmill, crashing through walls and rooms as if the world were rushing past him; people dancing in tiny rooms until their flying limbs shatter the walls.
All that wildness happens in Fuerza Bruta (Spanish for “Brute Force”), the Argentine spectacle that will transform the Ziff Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts into a theatrical funhouse.
For the show’s creators, action is everything. They dispense with script, story, words and any conventional sense of meaning to create a theater of the senses, simultaneously high impact and high concept. “For me, the word `idea’ doesn’t mean much,” Diqui James, the primary creator of Fuerza Bruta, says from Buenos Aires. “Idea represents something mental. For me, things come more from the body. First, I have an image, a physical impulse that I want to generate–action in the space, in the whole theater.”
Fuerza Bruta will transform the opera house theater with an ambitious environmental production that uses the space in ways radically different from the shows usually staged there. The performance will share the stage and vast backstage area with the audience, whose members will surround the performers and even participate. Instead of coming in through the front doors and the lobby, they will enter through the loading dock, which will be filled with specially created art and video, then pass through an industrial-chic lounge and restaurant created by famed party designer Barton G intended to mirror Fuerza’s disorienting environment.
Arsht Center management hopes to make its production of the show (which has already played in Argentina, New York, Edinburgh, London, Brazil, and Moscow) into a uniquely Miami experience, reflecting the area’s edgy, club-going energy and capacity for the unexpected.
”I thought this market, unlike any other city in America, had the ability to make [Fuerza Bruta] their own,” says Scott Shiller, the Arsht Center’s executive vice president.
Instead of staging the show in the sort of raw space in which it usually takes place, such as a tent or warehouse (in New York Fuerza is performed in a former bank), Shiller wanted to “do it in a theater in an unconventional, theatrical way — turn the theater on its ear.”
The show has already sold half the tickets for its four-week run, and Shiller is hopeful that the center will be able to extend it for another four weeks.
EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
Fuerza’s creators have been turning theater on its ear since James, who dropped out of acting school after six months, started the experimental La Organización Negra in 1987, a few years after the 1983 fall of the military junta in Argentina launched an artistic boom. LON was inspired more by rock concerts and street festivals than by traditional theater (the troupe famously once scaled a giant monument in Buenos Aires) and created shows with a dark, subversive edge.
In 1993 James and other LON members left to form De La Guarda, creating wild environmental spectacles that drew thousands in Buenos Aires and toured internationally, a run of several years in New York. In 2002, James split from De La Guarda co-founder Pichon Baldinu to launch Fuerza Bruta, bringing composer Gaby Kerpel, production manager Fabio D’Aquila and other De La Guarda members with him.
Fuerza Bruta is an intensely collaborative effort. The scenes may start with images in James’ mind. The man running on a treadmill through a cardboard ”wall” came to him while he was waiting in a bank and imagined breaking through the plate glass window and running down the street. The women who romp in water held by a giant plastic sheet suspended above the audience started with James’ wish to see a woman walking in an overhead pool of water.
But bringing those images to life is a painstaking and, in many ways, highly technical process. The show’s creators experiment with apparatus and materials and bring in architects and engineers. Fuerza Bruta took from four years to complete.
Not everything works.
”There’s a ton of things that seemed great, but I couldn’t do them,” James says. “It really hurts.”
But technology is not the point, says D’Aquila, who started as a musician in La Organización Negra and now oversees Fuerza Bruta’s complex production, from casting the performers to building the set and machinery. ”Our technique is to use technology to allow us to develop very human images,” D’Aquila says from Buenos Aires. “When the scene starts, you forget about the technical part. The pool is a very intense section because of all the technology. When it starts, people think it’s going to fall on their heads. But then you forget about the machinery and get involved.”
As the scenes develop, they can surprise even the creators, whether because they’re more striking in action than in concept or because they take on unexpected significance. ”The man who runs has a lot of meaning for us,” D’Aquila says. “He runs through life, but he doesn’t choose it; he doesn’t decide his life. A wall comes at him, and he breaks it. A bar comes, and a machine breaks it, and he has to run again.”
James emphasizes that Fuerza’s images are meant to function on their own, whether the audience enjoys them purely for their physical and sensory impact or interprets them on another level.
”I don’t work with meanings; they don’t interest me,” James says. “I’m not saying that the representation of a man breaking with routine is a man running on a treadmill and breaking through a wall. It’s not a metaphor for me. For me it is what it is, and afterwards everyone has their own interpretation.”
Fuerza Bruta’s performers must combine physical skill and a particularly adventurous attitude that allow them to enjoy the show’s physical risks and the uncertainties of interaction with members of the audience, who are encouraged to touch, dance, and otherwise participate. Maria Laura Mesigos, who started with De La Guarda in 2001, says she loves Fuerza’s visceral energy, the sense of fantasy made into slightly dangerous reality. She particularly enjoys hurling herself into water on a plastic sheet high above a crowd (her favorite section, during which she was spun in circles plastered to a giant sail, was unfortunately cut).
IN SCIENCE FICTION
”It’s so much fun, and we have such a good time. We’re really laughing,” Mesigos says. “You’re not afraid. You feel like a mermaid, like an aquatic being. It’s like being in science fiction.
“Everything that happens is real. . . . It hits the performer as much as the spectator with a maximum of sensation.”
Fuerza Bruta has been criticized for focusing on sensation over meaning, for discarding thought for high-impact action. The New York Times called it “theater for people who don’t really like theater. Patrons are not required to think, feel or even sit down for this hourlong sensory bath.”
And audiences for De La Guarda and Fuerza have often been younger people who don’t usually attend traditional shows.
The Arsht Center hopes to tap into that broader base with Fuerza, amping up the appeal with the loading dock multimedia installations and the lounge, so that going to Fuerza will be less like attending a Broadway musical and more like hitting the Wynwood Gallery Walk and then the club scene.
But James rejects the notion that Fuerza’s appeal to young audiences or people who prefer physical experience to literary meaning diminishes his show’s value.
”To me, one of the strongest things that resulted from Fuerza Bruta’s kind of theater is that a ton of young people who have never gone to the theater went to Fuerza Bruta or De La Guarda,” he says. “You have to have an open mind. If the fact that it doesn’t have a story is a problem for you, you’re not going to enjoy it. If you give more value to creativity, to the experience, then you will. Theater isn’t limited because there are no words.”
- IF YOU GO
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday; 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday through July 5.
Where: Ziff Ballet Opera House (enter at loading dock on Northeast 14th Street between Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast Second Avenue), Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
Cost: $73.75
Info: 305-949-6722; www.arshtcenter.org