Fuerzabruta

Published Tuesday 6 June 2006 at 17:25 by Jason Best

The newly revamped Roundhouse reopens with a vibrant and exhilarating work of physical theatre from the team behind De La Guarda, the Argentinean performance group which had a year-long run at the iconic north London venue in 1999.

The building, a former locomotive shed and gin store, played host to a string of rock and punk luminaries in the 1960s and 1970s and Fuerzabruta (which roughly translates as brute force) feels perfectly at home there.

Indeed, the buzz of anticipation from the audience standing in the centre of the Roundhouse’s vast brick drum before the performance starts seems closer to a rock concert than a normal theatrical event. When the show gets underway, a throbbing electronic score, plus liberal quantities of smoke and strobe lighting, give it the energy and intensity of a rave.

The performance oscillates between passages of tension and moments of release. A solitary figure in rumpled cream suit, collar and tie, strides purposefully on an accelerating treadmill that advances into the heart of the audience, bursting through the obstacles that appear in his path. Later, a man and a woman cling to opposite sides of a vast, circular sheet that gyrates furiously overhead, at times resembling a giant sail, at others a lunar landscape. Then a huge transparent pool containing sportive water nymphs slowly descends on the audience.

There is nothing resembling a narrative. “No one knows the meaning of the work, because it doesn’t have one” assert its creators. But it is possible to discern a pattern. Stretches in which men and women in suits and skirts stoically engage in seemingly futile, Sisyphean endeavour (the stuff on treadmills, for example) alternate with outpourings of elemental play as figures tumble through the air or slide through water. Is a point being made about the constraints of civilisation versus the freedom of nature? It doesn’t really matter when the show is as joyful and exuberant as this.