Fuerza Bruta: The erotic spectacle that inspired Madonna – and rewrote the rules of theatre
'Action that makes you feel': Fuerza Bruta: Aven is at the Roundhouse in London from July 11 - Fuerza Bruta
“Trying to describe Fuerza Bruta is a nightmare,” says Diqui James, creator of the astonishing, if uncategorisable, Argentinian performance troupe. “How do you explain to people what they will see in our show? If you say it is theatre, it sounds boring.” (To James, a 59-year-old from Buenos Aires with the wiry limbs and piratical dress sense of an ageing rock star, traditional theatre is both “elitist” and “intellectual” – which is to say, the devil’s work.) “So you say it’s a concert; or, it’s a party. But that’s still not right: more than anything, it’s carnival.”
Whatever you call it, Fuerza Bruta (Spanish for “brute force”) – which over the past two decades has performed in 37 countries, to a combined live audience of almost seven million, and next month returns to the Roundhouse, in London for the first time in a decade – is a phenomenon.
Its latest wordless, 80-minute show, Aven, for which the audience remains standing throughout, is a series of astonishments: two couples on wires pursue one another at impossible angles across the surface of a vast illuminated globe that is suspended overhead; a woman writhes, fully clothed, in a giant fish tank while her would-be companion clings to the outside, pounding on the glass as if trying to find a way in; a line of dancers advances through a wind tunnel, colourful clouds eddying around them like the contrails of a Red Arrow.
Drums are whumped, lasers pierce the darkness, ticker tape flurries through the air as a performer strafes the crowd with a power hose. It all springs from what James calls his desire “to create action that makes you feel”; something moving, in both senses.
Much of this will feel familiar to anyone who has seen a previous performance by Fuerza Bruta – who opened the refurbished Roundhouse in 2006 and returned in 2013 – or its previous incarnation, De La Guarda, which shared most of the same creative team. De La Guarda’s final show, which opened off-Broadway in 1998, became something of a celebrity magnet.
“Leonardo DiCaprio came; Mick Jagger was there with his daughter; Madonna was fascinated by the show – then took our four best performers to dance for her next tour,” recalls James, who is talking to me backstage in Mexico City where Fuerza Bruta has a three-week residency. The production team working on The Matrix were repeat customers; when James first watched their film, released the following year, he says he spotted “a couple of little elements” that felt curiously recognisable.
Wow factor: Fuerza Bruta's performers in Aven - Fuerza Bruta
But in other ways, Aven represents a departure from anything James has attempted before. Gone is the adrenalised, violent undercurrent of those earlier spectacles – one memorable motif saw a besuited man on an outsize treadmill, fleeing over upturned furniture and through polystyrene walls before being gunned down, then getting back to his feet, only to be shot once more. James’s impulse this time, catering to an audience emerging from the doldrums of the pandemic, was to make “something really, really happy. I took out all the dark parts of the script. I was thinking I want a show where there is not one second of a negative situation.”
In recent years, he has come to the conclusion that, above all, “humans are seeking beauty. When I stand looking out to sea and see these huge waves and feel the wind in my face, it’s so powerful and beautiful, and simple. I feel like I am watching the exact same thing that a human was watching 300,000 years ago. And for sure, what happens to me in that moment is the same thing that happened to that guy; we have the identical feeling.” So out went the gunshots and in came a gentle giant: a whale; lifesize, inflatable and manoeuvred by two performers strapped inside its belly.
As to why it had to be a whale, James cannot say. “I am not a guy that needs to find reasons to do things,” he says. “Why the whale is there is more like a feeling – of its size, its power – than a reason. I am very physical, not intellectual. When I am creating a show, if I start thinking too much, I say to myself, ‘Come on, Diqui, move along!’ because it never does me any good to start asking why.”
Which isn’t to say that his “stupid idea of the flying whale” didn’t give him sleepless nights. As the artistic director of Fuerza Bruta, James’s role is not only to come up with the big creative concepts – what he sees as “the sweet and salty part” of his job – but also to manage the entire production, which “is the more tiring thing. You have to persuade someone to put up the money, bring in the performers and the technicians, who all have [to support] families on their backs. That’s a heavy responsibility. So I have to convince a lot of people. But I am pretty good at convincing. And sometimes I think that is dangerous, so I have to be careful.”
He tells me about the time he was summoned to a meeting by “the guy in Buenos Aires who was president of the Argentinian Olympic Committee”. In 2018, the capital was playing host to the Summer Youth Olympic Games and, thanks to the fame of Fuerza Bruta, James’s name had ended up on a list of artistic types who might be able to help stage the opening ceremony. “He said: ‘We want you to do a show in the arena. Maybe we can call Madonna to sing Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’,” James recalls. “He was smoking this huge cigar, in a non-smoking room full of people associated with sport, and me. And I said, ‘I think it’s not a good idea.’ And everyone was like…”, James puts his hands to his cheeks and pulls a face like the scream emoji. “So he put his cigar down and he said, ‘Well, what do you suggest?’”
James takes a deep breath. “I told him I would do a ceremony in the street, in the centre of Buenos Aires, at the Obelisk [a historic monument visible from across the capital], for free, for everybody. Everyone was looking at each other, and he said, ‘But how is that possible? Do you know how to do that?’
“Yes, and I will bring a proposal to you in two weeks. We will take care of it.”
“But we will have to close the streets and…”
“Yes, yes, we can do it.”
“And then… BANG!” James claps his hands like the crack of a starting pistol. “I mean, so many meetings we had: with the mayor of Buenos Aires, the police, international security, the army, the culture ministry. And then the International Olympic Committee sent people over and the process began all over again.”
'We hug everybody, we give kisses': Fuerza Bruta perform Aven - Fuerza Bruta
In the end, James says, “I convinced everybody, I couldn’t believe it. But then I would get out of those meetings and say to myself, ‘Maybe they are right, this is going to be a mess…’” In the end, the opening ceremony, the first in Olympic history to be held outside a stadium (something Paris will attempt to replicate on the Seine next month), was a triumph. Fuerza Bruta’s gravity-defying performers, scampering up the Obelisk or clambering around airborne Olympic rings, were watched by a live audience that official figures place at 200,000 but James believes was closer to half a million. “So being convincing is very important to what I do.”
When I ask James where he got such apparently unshakeable confidence, he relates it to coming of age in a country in the grip of a military dictatorship. “I was the second child of four. My father was like a traditional English [patriarch]: tough, showing no feelings. My mother was nice but weak. And I was sent to a Catholic school where I didn’t fit in,” he says. I try to picture him – this mastermind of unabashedly erotic spectacle, dressed in a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hell Let Loose” – as a meek schoolboy taking communion. “Catholic school and a dictatorship together, can you imagine? My world was so small. But I was always convinced that there was something more out there.”
His only option, as he saw it, was to break himself out of the life he’d been given. “So I grew up fighting: with my father; with my older brother, who was everything my father wanted him to be; with my friends. And then I went to drama school, where I went against everything [they taught] and everyone was telling me that what I was doing was not theatre. So I had to keep fighting, and I went forward without money, without any support. But I got used to that. I lived life like a war.”
'We have had to learn to keep our hands to ourselves': a scene from Aven - Fuerza Bruta
In 1993, James formed De La Guarda with Gaby Kerpel, Alejandro García and Fabio D’Aquila (who today serve in Fuerza Bruta as musical director, technical director and general co-ordinator, respectively) and co-creator Pichón Baldinu (with whom he parted ways in 2003). That same year (“my worst year, economically”), he married one of the dancers from the troupe, and in 1994, their son Jaime was born.
“He grew up backstage,” says James. “I would be performing and he would be sleeping on the subwoofers.” Music seems to have seeped into his bloodstream: that baby is now 30 and, says James proudly, “he’s doing really well”. That is something of an understatement; Jaime is both co-founder of the hugely successful international club brand Bresh and, under the stage alias Louta, a pop star who opened for Taylor Swift when her Eras tour passed through Buenos Aires last November.
At that time, having premiered earlier in the year, Aven was playing in a purpose-built venue on the other side of town, where, according to James, it became “the city’s most-seen show of 2023. Many popular mainstream Broadway shows went to Buenos Aires last year – but we sold more tickets than them.” However, following the inauguration of Javier Milei, the Right-wing president, in December, and amid economic turbulence that has seen the poverty rate approach 60 per cent, James made the decision to close Aven in February, after 300 performances. “In Argentina, we are facing something that is really new in our history,” he says. “Salaries are now so low and inflation is so high that even people with a job find they are poor. It’s so crazy. I hope change will come soon.”
In the meantime, the show has hit the road – which is how James has ended up in Mexico, from where Aven will head to both Rio de Janeiro and London. Before the evening’s performance, I catch up with a couple of the cast in their dressing room. They take pleasure in telling me about the demands of a show that ostensibly requires them to disprove the laws of physics. Months of training have rendered their bodies almost unrecognisable. “I have tripled the size of my back,” says Federico Diaz. “And I am like the Hulk,” adds Camila Taranto, grinning.
'More than anything, it's carnival': Fuerza Bruta, Aven - Fuerza Bruta
I ask if, when they perform the show abroad, they consider themselves representatives of something uniquely Argentinian. “Yes, definitely,” says Taranto. “The spirit of party and enthusiasm, and this essence of carnival that we have.” But also, adds Diaz, “social manners are quite different in Argentina: we are very passionate and touchy people”.
Taranto nods: “We hug everybody, we give kisses.” And so, says Diaz, when performing for foreign audiences, running amok among the crowd, “we have had to learn to keep our hands to ourselves, because in other cultures it can be taken as harassment”.
The last time I’d seen Fuerza Bruta perform – at the Roundhouse in 2006 – the iPhone didn’t yet exist. This time, throughout the show in Mexico City, camera phones are held aloft by spectators desperate to capture Aven’s wow-factor in social-media-friendly bites. “At the beginning, the performers would complain about it,” says James.
“But I said to them, these days you have to be more worried if nobody is taking a picture of you. If people are filming the show it’s because they are enjoying it. I will never tell the audience not to take pictures. I like people to feel free to express themselves, and the phone is almost a part of the body nowadays.”
Later that night, when the whale comes scudding over the audience’s heads – Diaz cavorting around inside like Jonah – I look around me. Caught in the glow of so many phone screens, a thousand faces gaze up, transfixed. What Fuerza Bruta does may be a battle to stage, exhausting to perform and a nightmare to describe; but, to watch, it is a dream.
Fuerza Bruta: Aven is at the Roundhouse, London NW1 (roundhouse.org.uk), July 11-Sept 1
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