'Fuerza Bruta' – The Roundhouse, June 2006
‘It’s important to remember the Roundhouse, when revived in the early ’60s, was a theatrical venue. At the all-nighters you’d get theatrical performances, light shows, circus acts and so on. It was, as they used to say, a “happening”. The audience were part of the interactive show – heckling, shouting, changing the very nature of events. I think it was a unique atmosphere’ John Cumming, gig promoter – as told to Time Out in May 2006
Most Londoners had never seen anything like it. For an intense 70 minutes in the Roundhouse, men in suits and women in flirty dresses pursued each other up and down the walls in a giddy gravity-defying display of euphoria.
That was 1999, five years before the Roundhouse closed its doors for a £29.7 million refurbishment. At that point the flamboyantly Argentinian De La Guarda seemed like an exotic outsider. However, the performance company made the building so much its own that it made perfect sense to reopen in 2006 with their follow-up work to ‘Periodo Villa Villa’, ‘Fuerza Bruta’. The new work was a slightly darker but equally physical piece of theatre, blurring the lines between performance and wild party.
The Roundhouse started life as an engine shed in the nineteenth century and after falling into disuse became a magnet for radical art and raving lunacy. Since 1966 the venue has hosted a bewildering array of music, art and clubbing events – including the Rolling Stones, the UFO club’s 24-hour party and a giant bouncy castle. Now, in 2009, the Roundhouse has become a permanent fixture on London’s arts and music scene – it’s difficult to imagine a West End theatre that would’ve been willing to host ‘Fuerza Bruta’s pièce de resistance, a giant transparent-bottomed swimming pool which is lowered to just above the audience’s heads. The crowd gazes up, as the performers smash dramatically on the bottom of the pool…
