Maximum performance

This is a story of nymphs shipwrecked in an aerial swimming pool above the audience. Boom! They swim and slide to the beat of the music while the sea collapses over the spectators. Boom! The waves break and it rains for real. Boom! Walls filled with feathers burst. The nymphs jump and wave with wet faces, as if they had been studying the bottom of the sea from the surface, and all that's left is for the audience to pull faces like gawping fish.

Vibrant, unexpected, brutal and unusual - FuerzaBruta is all this and much more. The show, which premiered at Madrid's Circo Price Theater on Tuesday night, is directed by the Argentinean Diqui James (the cofounder of the legendary De la Guarda company) and designed to shock the audience from the moment the curtain goes up.

No words can describe what happens on the show's 360-degree performance space, which features no seats and actors who fly, dance, swim and create confusion, compelling the spectators to form part of the chaos. Interactive and poetic theater - to the max.

"If between one number and the next, the spectator has time to comment to his neighbor: [...] 'It's like being inside a glass!' 'No, no; it's the maternal womb...' we have failed. It's about abandoning the cerebral and appealing to instinct, of living a physical and sensory experience," James says enthusiastically.

The origins of FuerzaBruta lie in De la Guarda, the Argentinean independent, acrobatic and experimental theater company that from 1993 to 2006 crossed all the lines and in 2005 gave another turn of the screw in search of the most intuitive and wild theater. A large part of the De la Guarda team involved itself with the new project, including Gaby Kerpel, who is responsible for FuerzaBruta's hyperactive electronic soundtrack.

James wants the audience to feel part of the action. "I always thought theater should be something like this, a mass celebration," he says. "With this show we want people to feel like jumping in the swimming pool, not feel alienated. That is what differentiates us from the circus, where skill imposes a distance, saying: 'Look how difficult what I'm doing is.' Not us - we involve them."

FuerzaBruta broke attendance records on the streets of Buenos Aires during the Bicentenary of the Revolution in May 2010 (amazingly over two million people turned up, and not one person was injured) and has rocked the foundations of London's Roundhouse theater. An appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and six shows a week on Broadway also pay testament to its success. Meanwhile, Miami, Bogotá, Lisbon and Taiwan are some of the others places through which the show has passed before reaching Madrid.

The performance, which lasts 60 minutes, prides itself on not warning the audience that it may be directly attacked. "The spectator is not emotionally safe at any moment of the work," they warn. Those who are squeamish and those with heart problems should stay away.

One of the biggest challenges of FuerzaBruta is combining a ferocious explosion of the senses with new techniques. "The whole time you see the technicians working and the actors performing," says James. "Cinema has already blown our heads off, so the theater is never going to be the same. It's like we were doing the theater of 500 years ago, but with 21st-century technology. Putting the audience in a glass, just imagine! We have to lose our minds, that is the aim."

FuerzaBruta. Until October 23 at Teatro Circo Price, Ronda de Atocha 35, Madrid. www.fuerzabruta.net