Fuerza Bruta is a ... performance, here in Argentina ... that has been touring the world. I went to the ... performance, this afternoon. This is my best attempt to convey what I experienced. He seems larger than life, on stage in the center of the standing crowd, as we enter the room to the sound of an explosion. A nightmare worthy of Burning Man: as much as he runs, he stays in one place. Other people stand still as they violently brush past him, falling stiff like trees as they reach the end of the stage. His tie and sports coat flap in the fierce wind. We are enveloped in very loud electronica. He jumps through a solid wall, then another, and another. He sleeps. Invisible women unfurl in midair and dance, horizontal, dancing and jumping on a brilliant silver trampoline whose surface is, unaccountably, vertical. Their every leap sends waves of brilliant color careening across its surface, ricocheting off the ceiling and the floor. Chairs begin a procession past his bed. He awakes and grabs his coat off one of them before it falls off the end. When he gets up, his bed begins moving off the stage as well, and again he has to run to stay in place. For a time he drags his bed behind him, but it's futile. Four tables appear, with chairs around them. He sits down. But all the tables and chairs begin a lemming-like march toward the end of the stage, with him in one. He snatches them, saving them from their doom, but it's all he can do to keep up with the suicidal furniture; any time he sits down, they resume their inexorable march. At last he has saved only one table and two chairs, and then not even those. Suddenly we are moving back, as if to open a mosh pit. Beatrice and I are separated. I did not know it was possible to tap-dance like that in such heavy clothes, and I've never seen anybody tap-dancing to electronica before. They're not even wearing tap plates! We are at the bottom of a swimming pool, fingers of light reaching us through the water around the woman swimming above. Others join her; the water begins a slow wave motion from one end of an immense transparent plastic sheet to another, sweeping the swimmers with it. The sheet lowers until it's on my head and everybody else's hands, with women in swimsuits sliding back and forth across it. The swimmers begin to jump up and down, turning the membrane and the water into a drum. The strobe lights begin. The performers are among us, dancing with us. They smash bricks over the heads of audience members. Debris flies everywhere. The dancers are on the stage, dancing. The ceiling falls and smashes to pieces on their heads, making a huge noise, but it only interrupts the dance for a moment. It falls again, and again, and again. The DJ is wearing a powdered wig and spraying the audience with water from a hose. The audience floor has become a nightclub; we're dancing and jumping up and down. We are blinded by a blizzard of scraps of paper. At last it is over. The audience is sweaty, wet, and exhilarated.
