I went down to Leith docks to see Fuerzabruta (literally translated as "Brute Force") last night. It's one of the shows that got quite a bit of advanced press for its large scale "visual and sensory" experience, and the fact that audience members often come out soaked in water and covered in bits of paper and styrofoam. This is also the first time the show has been performed in a huge black tent. In London, they've done it in buildings so far.
It's not really a successor to the much-missed, anarcho-circus troupe Archaos, although the performers do have foreign accents - they're Argentinian though not French. No, this is more of performance art piece meets circus acrobatics with Ibiza-style rave with costumes thrown in.
You enter the black tent into a large restaurant-bar area for a drink or bite of sushi and then the masses are corralled into a large, empty performance space in the main tent. The tent can apparently cater for an audience of 1200. There is no seating, which helps. You are packed like sardines too.
During the course of the show large mobile stages are wheeled in through the crowd. A spotlight falls on a white-suited man running the wrong way on a conveyor belt. He runs faster, but he doesn't move forward. There's a gun shot. He falls. Then he gets up again peels off his bloody shirt to reveal a clean white one underneath and starts running again.
There is no dialogue in the show, just a blasting, pulsating soundtrack, so it's not clear who the man is, what he is running from, and what happened to him after he was shot. It's like a manifestation of some psycho-nightmare. The fear and frenzy in his behaviour gets more acute when more people climb up on his conveyor belt walking towards him and falling off the end over and over again. Objects and whole buildings start flying at him. Rain (sprinklers) and wind (mega wind fan) blast him. The man just keeps on running and running.
It's kind of mesmerising with all the strobe lights, smoke, water, wind, and the loud techno blasting at you.
After the running man there is more weirdness - a giant silvery curtain swoops down like a huge wing and drapes back and forth across the audience. Characters run sprite-like around the walls of the tent. A wigged DJ pumps the air to get the crowd and the adrenalin going (the rave element).
If there's a weakness it's that the series of specatacles don't hold together well. Stuff happens that makes you gasp with amazement for a while, but in the absence of any storyline to hold these scenes together, it wasn't sufficient to sustain that sense of wonder.
This seems a surprising thing to say for a £25 show that couldn't have been much more than an hour or so and has some wild moments the likes of which I'm highly unlikely to see anywhere else. But even with its unconventional approach it would have benefited from a clearer narrative.
The highlight comes in the latter stages of the show where four girls in a gigantic swimming pool with a see-through bottom are lowered from the rooftop.
The transparent pool with a large puddle of water in it, lowers just inches above the audience's head, while the girls frolick and splash above, pressing their hands and faces against the bottom at upraised (many manly) arms.
It was at this point, that I and my companion having found ourselves on the fringes on the crowd, realised we were in the wrong part of the tent. We were beyond the edge of the pool.
The one image that will stay with me was when the pool was raised back up the roof, with a spotlight on it. The way the light caught the collected liquid in the centre of the pool looked like a giant amoeba, with the girls clinging together at its centre the nucleus.
If you go, remember to stand near the centre. Be prepared to get a little wet as well.
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