Fuerza Bruta: Aven at the Roundhouse – review

The Argentinian theatre troupe Fuerza Bruta hasn’t been seen in the UK for more than a decade. I haven’t seen them myself since a memorable encounter in a dark tent in Edinburgh in 2007. Yet here they are again – as visually stimulating and aurally challenging as ever.

Their new show Aven is beautiful, exciting and incredibly loud. The noise hits you in your solar plexus as a line of drummers pound out the opening beat, arms flailing wide as their bodies bend into the instruments as if they are pulling out the sound.

Everything about the performance is like this – over the top, striving for full audience involvement, wanting to provoke the watchers, packed like sardines in the centre of the Roundhouse’s impressive iron-girded space, into full engagement.

It is full of amazing images from the start when a vast inflatable globe rolls around the ceiling, three acrobats sprawled across its surface before they get to their feet and start running around the circumference, poised at an impossible angle as harnesses hold them in the air. Later, a single woman is hoisted aloft by a crane and hangs from the end, running in space, exhilarating in her freedom and her beauty.

My memory of Fuerza Bruta was of standing under a transparent pool, where human mermaids pushed themselves across the water over my head; unforgettably wild. The same thing happens here, on a smaller scale, as a woman is lowered from the flies in a giant fish tank, pushing her body through the space as a man hangs below her, mimicking her movements.

At the close, a giant inflatable whale, with moving eyes, floats across the space, its voyage determined by two performers inside it, tipping their bodies in a huge giro sphere, as the crowd raise their hands and try to touch the floating fins.

All these moments are undoubtedly thrilling. The trouble is that they take time to pull off, and the bits in between are filled either with expectant waiting or with vigorous dance routines that are full of skill and energy as the dancers combine hip hop moves with the effects generated by performing on a travelator, for example. These are impressive, wondrously lit, constantly changing, but their length sometimes makes them feel like fill-ins before the next big effect.

The company’s artistic director Diqui James has said Aven is a show built after Covid that “abandons any hint of darkness” and is intended to be “the happiest show we have ever done.” In this, it succeeds. It’s a blast. But shadows sometimes illuminate the light, and this incarnation of Fuerza Bruta feels both more entertaining and less essential than of old.