You enter a dark, abandoned warehouse in Spain, where fire-lit neoprimitives fondle beef tongues. The tentative tranquility is shattered by explosions and church bells as you're nearly trampled by torch-wielding zombies and motorized carts. You're part of the show, and there's nowhere to hide.
La Fura dels Baus, a Catalan performance group, has been producing such multimedia events since 1979. Think Survival Research Laboratories with an ethno-industrial soundtrack and hors d'oeuvres - sans the coddling of California's safety code. Dinner theater has evolved, and the ambulance is standing by.
"This is not a spectacle you can simply observe from a distance without getting involved," says Pere Tantiñá, a veteran Furero.
In these multisensory happenings, there is no front row. It's collective creation with meat and machinery, as naked Neanderthals pelt onlookers with premasticated food and raw chicken parts. Performers and public caress or crash into one another with unabashed intimacy. Fura events bleed a sensual morbidity, and if it ends in -philia or confronts your phobias, they've probably done it.
Troupe members must be equal parts artist, athlete, construction worker - and lunatic. Hundreds of actors, studio artists, techies, and musicians have passed through the company and, through "mutual contamination," spawned provocative multidisciplinary offspring. What began as a street-performance cooperative is now a global movement: the umbrella group Fundicio Baus organizes everything from shows to expositions and larger-than-life spectacles, including the prelude to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Now Fura plans to defy the space-time continuum with a 24-act piece called Big Opera Mundi that will culminate at midnight, 1 January 2000, with each element following the earth's rotation to usher another time zone into the new millennium. From Act I in New Zealand to Act XXIV in Samoa, director Carlos Padrissa wants to use telecommunications to create an interactive, "telepathic" event that will interpret themes like Religion, Leisure, Utopia, and War.
But how do you translate the six sensations of a Fura performance to the two-dimensional digital world? "Every language has its method, its form," says Tantiñá. "What we won't try to do on the Internet is translate sensations that you can have only in person. Now that we're entering virgin territory, we don't know what to expect."
