Ask the members of Argentinian avant garde theatre company Fuerza Bruta how they describe themselves and you will be met with furrowed brows and half-hearted comparisons with Cirque du Soleil, before receiving a confident assertion that there isn’t anything quite like them. What can be said with certainty is that Fuerza Bruta (or “brute force”) is true to its name.
The group, which premiered its first performance in Buenos Aires in 2005 before going on to become a national institution and tour the world, offers a mixture of hip-hop dance, high-wire artistry, light and noise extravaganza, and heat-pounding, feet-stomping euphoric rave. Depending on your interpretation, a show may weave an intricate narrative via metaphor and image – or simply be a spectacle for the sake of gorging one’s senses.
It is constantly evolving, and nobody – not even the cast themselves – is ever quite sure what will happen over the course of a performance. Camila Taranto, longtime member and current team captain, reminisces about one evening that concluded with an audience member getting down on one knee: “We were saying our goodbyes to the crowd,” she tells me, “and it was like, ‘Oh my God!, this guy is making a proposal!’” (Thankfully, his girlfriend said yes.) Another time, Federico Díaz, who joined the group in 2022 and has performed with it more than 300 times, recalls interacting with an attendee who was blind. “She was this little girl, and she was feeling things with her hands. Her mother told me: ‘She just wants to feel your face.’” Díaz consented, letting the little girl explore the contours of his features with her hands. “She was having her very own experience, totally unique. It was like I was frozen there in time with her, it was amazing.”
No matter how much things may change from night to night with Fuerza Bruta, one constant is the performers’ love of playing with the fourth wall – joyously shattering it and slowly piecing it back together. The group have mastered the art of seamlessly interacting with the audience. One moment the dancers will be caught up as actors in their own drama, completely oblivious to the crowd; the next you’ll be staring eye to eye with them, wondering if you’ve just joined in on stage. Their set pieces wheel through the crowd, often forcing spectators to scurry out of the way, and the group spontaneously make use of pulleys and harnesses to dip into the audience, playing with touch and sight to work the crowd into a frenzy.
True to its conceptual roots, Fuerza Bruta has remained an institution even as dancers have passed in and out of it. Usher performed as part of the group during its period off-Broadway, and it has also been joined by K-pop superstar Shownu and noted dancer and choreographer David Campos. The group’s current show, Aven (from the word heaven), is meant to inspire hope and joy in contrast to the troupe’s darker former incarnations; it comprises 14 dancers, with three different ensembles showing it in various cities at any given time. After a run in Buenos Aires, it has gone worldwide, hoping to give audiences a moment to breathe after all of the trauma of the pandemic years, and the rightward lurch of politics across much of the globe.
I caught up with the group in Mexico City, where they were visiting for a run of performances en route to London. Aven uses enormous inflatable devices, high-flying harnesses, wind and smoke machines, carefully orchestrated lighting and an expertly tuned audio soundscape to conjure a series of spectacles that, true to form, frequently smash down that fourth wall.
Backstage, hours before the show, the group rush me into their dressing room, which is filled with rows and rows of pastel trousers, blouses and blazers. I am permitted to dress up in some of their costumes, and then invited to strap myself into a harness and try my hand at co-navigating a show-stopping final act called The Whale – a giant, inflatable version of the sea creature that sways to and fro over the dancefloor while audiences strain upward to grasp on to its tantalisingly close fins.
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“You smell nice,” Díaz smiles as he clips me into the whale’s interior, and I wonder if I really do, or if he’s just trying to calm my fears that I may have got in over my head. For the next few minutes we throw ourselves to opposite sides of the creature’s interior, using our body weight to make it gyrate back and forth, before climbing into the whale’s windows to dance and smile at onlookers below. After just a few minutes I am dizzy and sweating profusely, wondering how the performers make it through their hour-long show.
Fuerza Bruta’s history is interwoven with the history of Argentina itself, although its dancers and creators distance themselves from politics, adopting an all-too-familiar resignation born of decades of regimes that can’t seem to bring one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations to lasting financial stability. “We cannot solve our economic problems,” says Diqui James, the artistic director. “I really don’t know why, I think we have everything we need. We have a beautiful culture built from people all over the world, but we can’t find a way to be together.”
“Fuerza Bruta stays away from politics,” Díaz declares, before softening his statement. “What we do is political in a way, but it doesn’t have to do directly with politics.” He goes on to say that the show is more about connecting with the moment, a respite from all the dark things happening politically.
Even though the show is seen as an alternative to the rough political realities that have persisted in Argentina and other parts of the world, the group tell me that the fall of Argentina’s dictatorship was crucial to Fuerza Bruta’s formation. Its antecedents date back to the artistic ferment unleashed after the transition from military rule to democracy during the late 1970s and early 80s. At that point, James and longtime musical collaborator Gaby Kerpel were involved in an avant-garde group called La Organización Negra, which aimed to shock some life back into the bodies of Argentinians subdued during the dictatorship. Its tools were open-air performances in the streets of Buenos Aires where everyone – regardless of social class, education level or interest in the arts – could take part.
Following La Organización Negra, James and Kerpel participated in De La Guarda, which eventually gave rise to Fuerza Bruta in 2003. From the beginning it was meant to appeal to everyone – James sniffs at theatre troupes that only appeal to high-minded intellectuals. “In Argentina we have a lot of problems: poverty, different levels of education and access to culture. We wanted to break through that and come up with a language that everybody will understand.” In order to do so, the company literally built its own theatrical means of communication, inventing the machinery that lets it do its unique, euphoric performances.
Ultimately, for James, Fuerza Bruta is all about the moment, the very fleeting experience that his brand of theatre can conjure. When I ask him how he thinks his troupe will be remembered, he responds that he doesn’t think it will be at all – all theatre ever truly has is that ephemeral moment of the performance. “I really don’t think about the future,” he declares. “I always try to do our best show tonight.”
Charged up and moving with the crowd in Mexico City, I sense just how true this is for James. Disappointed that for years he would go to such lengths to conjure rapture, only to turn on the lights at the end of the show and kick everybody out, for Aven James insisted that all of his venues provide an afterparty. “I asked myself: why do we push everybody out right when they’re all charged up? So now it’s in the contracts: after the show finishes this ball comes out and everybody dances. This is a whole new experience, and I think it’s working very well.”
As I swing my hips and throw my head to the sky, seeing looks of joy all around me, I have to agree – this beautiful moment is all that’s left of Aven, and none of us here wants to let go of it.
Fuerza Bruta: Aven is at the Roundhouse, London, from 9 July to 1 September.