Hello and Goodbye.

There are essentially three stages in one’s life – birth, growth and death. Many artists, whether it be Emily Dickinson or The Used, explore these themes through their works. Fuerzabruta, an exciting off-off Broadway show, employs aquatic, acrobatic, aerial and dance components to explore the many phases of life while providing the audience with a unique and thrilling experience.

A mysterious man in white opens the show as he strolls on a giant treadmill, centered in the middle of the standing spectators. His unhurried, mild walk represents a child’s emergence from a woman’s womb and into the real world. The stroll becomes a brisk walk, as the baby grows from infant to toddler, and then to child. The walk turns into a jog, symbolizing one’s entrance into adulthood, until finally he breaks out into a desperate run. He runs through adulthood and the events that accompany it. People run past him and towards him on the treadmill, illustrating that there are many who enter and leave our lives. Furniture and cardboard walls roll onto the treadmill, which the man struggles to avoid, depicting the obstacles we each encounter in life. All of a sudden, gunshots ring out and blood spatters as the unknown man falls to the ground, symbolically portraying the sudden way we each leave this world.

The treadmill is rolled away as a massive clear-bottom pool, hung from the ceiling, slowly descends above the audience, scraping the heads of those who are vertically blessed. Slowly, four scantily dressed women emerge from each corner of the pool, suggesting an infant’s entrance into the world. The slow emergence quickly changes as the mermaid-like figures splash, dive and swim rapidly in the water, representative of the busyness of the second phase of life – adulthood. As the music calms down, the swimmers slowly drift back into the corners of the pool, similar to the way in which the old and aged depart this world. While the females swim above them, viewers ogle and grope, with only a bit of plastic to shield them from sexual charges.

The show consists of many other acts such as a dance performance that revolves around the destruction of pizza boxes stuffed with confetti and an aerial, acrobatic catfight on a soaring aluminum curtain, which eventually descends onto the audience. All that is required of the audience is to gape as the cast members fly, dive, fight and swim.

At the closing of the show, the audience breaks out into dance to the thumping of techno music. Thought and feeling are not needed to enjoy this performance. The show’s success is due to its ability to engage the audience in an atypical theatrical experience. It gooses the senses with original and sophisticated spectacles that have an underlying meaning we can all relate to.