New York, New York

Fuerzabruta

I went to see this show at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York on April 13th, 2008. By then it had already been playing to sold out crowds for months.

I rushed in late and quickly took in the crowd. It wasn't the typical experimental crowd that I usually find at these shows in Vancouver. The crowd was thick with a few of the typical hipsters but also with quite a few seniors and primary school kids. I wondered if I was in for a Cirque de Soleil type of performance rather than something more avant garde that I was promised by the reviews. However, this was New York and I was not dissapointed.

The high energy cast didn't take long to whip the crowd into a flury of passionate interactions. You could feel club beats penetrating your skin, vibrating your psyche, chasing any inhabitions that may have hung about you as you entered the room. There were crowd directors to move us around every few minutes so you were never standing still for long. The crew threw cardboard, paper, water at us. When the half nude women shreaking in a pool above us began to play it started to look a bit like a wet t-shirt contest. I wondered, how are they going to pull this one off?

The cameras started coming out. Our hands raised up as the pool was lowered close enough for the crowd to touch. Touch we did, who could resist? Who, male or female, could resist the intimacy of the moment. You went from an instant of feeling like a pervert voyeur to feeling a strange need to connect with these women through touch. By the end of the show women and men were kissing and touching the actresses through the plexi glass swimming pool that hung tauntingly within reach.

I wonder how many, being caught up in the experience, blushed when they thought about how they acted the next day. I wonder how some of them would react if a picture of them kissing a partially nude women through plexiglass were to show up on the Internet somewhere.