The crowd squashed into the centre of the Roundhouse are dancing to the beat, arms raised above their heads. We are all in a cellophane pod, having helped haul a bubble of plastic over our heads. On top, the performers are jumping and bouncing, swimming and sliding, when suddenly holes open in the plastic and they swoop down in harnesses and hoist members of the audience up into the air.
Sounds amazing? It is and it isn't. The spirit of carnival meets the commercial sensibilities of the club in Fuerzabruta, a new– but not substantially new – version of the aerial and techno extravaganza that re-opened the Roundhouse in 2006 and was seen on the Edinburgh fringe in 2007. Since then, the show has travelled all over the world and has been resident in New York for almost five years.
The title translates as "brute force", and the show certainly takes that philosophy to heart in its determination to make the audience have fun. Director Diqui James and technical director Alejandro Garcia are masters of every trick in the book, bombarding us with stunning visual images accompanied by frenzied drumming, dry ice, clever lighting and wind machine-assisted ticker tape blizzards.
The show presents itself as a carnival, but it is a cleverly contrived and manipulated one in which genuine delirium is all too rare. The performers are mostly just out of reach. A few lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) spectators are briefly integrated into the action. But the rest of us are treated like a meek herd, necks constantly cricked upwards.
There are moments of undeniable wonder. Massive transparent rectangular paddling pools, in which attractive young women frolic like playful mermaids, are lowered until they almost touch our heads. A man on a treadmill continues to run blindly on, even after being shot and smashing into a cardboard wall. In the show's most interesting image, a man and women turn endlessly on either side of a giant sail, trying to reach each other but eternally doomed to never make physical contact.
Yet that image somehow sums it up: despite Fuerzabruta's wow factor and however much it throws at the audience, this show never seems interested in touching our hearts – or heads.
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