Fuerza Bruta is an aptly named ensemble since this Argentine postmodern theatrical experience is certainly packed with Brute Force! This return for a full summer season at the Roundhouse comes ten years after its last visit with the company’s explosive show of the same name that has toured the world, since 2005, gaining an international following through, for example, its partnership with the leading names in the trending world of K-pop!
Aven is a new show from the mind of Fuerza Bruta’s creator and artistic director, Diqui James, which has apparently (and given its scale, understandably) been five years in the making. The show itself is the filling in a “club” sandwich gripped on either side with pulsating music controlled by the hypnotically swaying DJ Luz Rodriguez, an integral member of the Latin-American party starters known as BRESH. She not only got the party started but finished it, too, with opening and closing sets that lasted longer than the show itself (the closing set becomes an extended after-party on Friday and Saturday nights).
One of the best things about this event came after the performance itself. Partygoers were able to enjoy Argentine food and drink, al fresco, in Caspar’s Bar situated on the Roundhouse terrace. Unlike most London theatres that can’t wait to close up after a show has finished, it was a pleasure to continue soaking up the Latin-American atmosphere with a glass or two of Argentine red and the sultry North London evening was an unexpected boon!
Although there are a small number of pre-bookable seats, the audience stands, as if in one large mosh pit as DJ Luz and her sashaying knees made way for five energetic drummers, situated above the audience’s eye-level on the same platform recently vacated by Luz. The heavy rhythms beaten out by the frantic five (three women and two men) impressively facilitated the mood but anyone who saw the Yamato Drummers at the Peacock Theatre recently would have been underwhelmed.
This loud musical backdrop ushered in an agenda of largely aerial sequences in which giant inflatables provided moving structures around which the episodic performance took shape. The curtained back of the performance space first opened up to allow a huge, inflated globe to pass through, onto which four performers were shackled, literally walking, running, and dancing around the world before the globe emitted streams of gas. The next party trick took place in a huge vertical tube with streams of ticker-tape gusting through the enclosure as a man rose and fell inside the horizontal tube in which the light changed colour. Then came a box filled with water inside which a woman writhed and splashed as a man whirled around underneath, held in place by an attachment at his waist. As he rotated, the woman energetically thrashed around in a kind of orgasmic thrall.
Throughout all of this, the spectators were marshalled by staff in black t-shirts, moved away – sometimes rather too brusquely for paying punters – to make way for entrances and exits. This was particularly true of the next “act”, which featured an extending platform coming out across the audience on which a group of white-suited men, attached by wires from the flies, moving in synchronised rhythms, leading to more explosions of ticker tape over the audience. There was a lot of mess to clear up!
A woman suspended by a wire from a metal jib, ran through the air over the audience’s heads and there was one sequence performed behind a see-through screen far to the left, which I really couldn’t see. Like many immersive experiences, the nature of this beast is that there will always be something that it is difficult to see.
The piece de resistance is an enormous blue whale, possessing an eye that disconcertingly winked at the audience, and two men inside, visible through large portholes, like some incredible submersible from a novel by Jules Verne or perhaps the whale that swallows Pinocchio’s “father”, Gepetto. The whale’s large tail splatted audience members harmlessly while others reached out to grab it. At some point, water rained down on the spectators (word to the wise, don’t stand in the middle if you want to stay dry)! It was an impressively forceful ending (although there was still an hour of DJ Luz to enjoy).
Aven is an event that merges circus, aerial movement, giant inflatables and club anthemic music. It’s loud and boisterous and be prepared to get bumped around and spend most of your time looking upwards. But it was also great fun and such an opportunity to simultaneously dance, drink and be awestruck by impressive stagecraft doesn’t come along often. The Roundhouse was the perfect venue for such revelry.
