Shifting show puts the senses in a spin
Fuerza Bruta may mean Brute Force. But the show that opened at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night is more surreal wonderland than bruising attack, a fabulously disorienting trip to a watery world where life rushes at you from all sides.
The shift starts as you enter the Ziff Opera House through the loading dock on 14th Street into what is normally backstage, and a lofty, black-curtained club created by party impresario Barton G. The industrial design and flickering video might be radical for the Arsht Center opera house, but it’s standard for the nightclub world. So is the black, high-ceilinged space you move into for the performance itself, which was packed with a crowd full of 20-somethings eager to scream, dance and jump along. ”This doesn’t feel like the arts center,” said one veteran performance-goer, looking around.
The sensory assault and 36-degree staging of Fuerza Bruta has its roots in ’60s experimental dance and ’80s performance. But the level of invention, visual beauty, and energy make Fuerza a mentally and sensually invigorating experience.
The disorientation hits with Fuerza Bruta’s opening blackout, which leaves you standing, sightless, not knowing what comes next or from where, so that lights shining through blowing clouds of dry ice seem like a major event. When the ”Running Man” (Martin Buzzo) emerges on his treadmill, he seems to float through the audience (the crowd was initially slow to adapt to the constant shifts required to accommodate the big moving set pieces, leading to an early claustrophobic crush at one side of the room).
Buzzo walks, then runs, seeming to barely stay on his feet, smashes through a moving door and cardboard walls, is felled twice by a gunshot, and joined by other performers who jostle past him to topple off the end of the treadmill. It’s as if Buzzo is thrusting determinedly, sometimes desperately, through the rough life rushing past him. The bed he briefly rests on is pulled away from him, and at one point he frantically tries to hold onto tumbling tables and chairs so he can sit.
Most of the rest of the dreamlike show has a gentler or giddier feel, often playing with images of water. Two women, suspended on cables, slowly leap and somersault high across a giant silvery curtain, then intensify to running and hurling themselves, as if blown by a gale across a wall of water. A manic figure sprays the crowd with a cloud of water. A huge sheet of silvery plastic billows overhead, then descends on the audience like an ocean dropping down — people responded by dancing, batting the plastic, lighting up the darkness underneath with their celLphones.
The eight riveting performers work to get the audience to participate, to scream, dance to composer Gaby Kerpel’s pounding music, drop their inhibitions. They rush through the crowd, bashing thrilled individuals with confetti-filled pizza boxes, pulling them up on scaffolding for a flailing dance.
When an enormous plastic pool of water appears overhead, the four women writhing and sliding inside seem like strange water creatures; with the light shining overhead.
It’s as if they’re walking on water and we’re deep below looking up.
When the light blacks out, the audience sees their own faces reflected down at them; it’s as if our point of view has been flipped so we see ourselves as the water sirens looking down see us.
As the pool descends, the women laughing and pressing and kissing the plastic, the audience pressing back — as if reaching for another world that they can see and almost, but not quite, touch.
Fuerza ends with an exhilarating shock: Buzzo, with two other performers, hurtling down off a high platform and through a wall to run wildly, suspended in the air. It’s thrilling — as if he’s leapt off his harsh treadmill and burst through to some other, much freer place.