Call it theater of the surreal -- made spectacularly and disorientingly real: Women romping overhead in a pool of water. A man on a treadmill, crashing through walls and rooms as if the world were rushing past him. People dancing in tiny rooms until their flying limbs shatter the walls.

All that wildness happens in Fuerza Bruta (Spanish for Brute Force), the Argentine spectacle that will transform the Ziff Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts into a theatrical funhouse beginning Tuesday.

For the show's creators, action is all. They dispense with script, story, words and any conventional sense of meaning to create a theater of the senses, simultaneously high impact and high concept. 'For me, the word `idea' doesn't mean much,'' Diqui James, the primary creator of Fuerza Bruta, says from Buenos Aires. ``Idea represents something mental. For me, things come more from the body. First I have an image, a physical impulse that I want to generate. Action in the space, in the whole theater.''

Fuerza Bruta will transform the opera house theater with an ambitious environmental production that uses the space in ways radically different from the shows usually staged there. The performance will share the stage and vast backstage area with the audience, whose members will surround the performers and even participate. Instead of coming in through the front doors and the lobby, they will enter through the loading dock, which will be filled with specially created art and video, then pass through an industrial-chic lounge and restaurant created by famed party designer Barton G intended to mirror Fuerza's disorienting environment.

Arsht Center management hopes to make its production of the show, which has already played in Argentina, New York, the Edinburgh Festival, London, Brazil, and a Moscow stadium for the Eurovision Song Contest, into a uniquely Miami environment reflecting the area's edgy, club-going energy and capacity for the unexpected.

''I thought this market, unlike any other city in America, had the ability to make [Fuerza Bruta] their own,'' says Scott Shiller, the Arsht Center's executive vice president.

Instead of staging the show in the sort of raw space in which it usually takes place, such as a tent or warehouse (in New York Fuerza is performed in a former bank), Shiller wanted to ``do it in a theater in an unconventional, theatrical way -- turn the theater on its ear.''

The show has already sold half the tickets for its four-week run, and Shiller is hopeful that the center will be able to extend it for another four weeks.

EXPERIMENTAL THEATER

Fuerza's creators have been turning theater on its ear since James, who dropped out of acting school after six months, started the experimental La Organización Negra in 1987, a few years after the 1983 fall of the military junta in Argentina launched an artistic boom. LON was inspired more by rock concerts and street festivals than by traditional theater (the troupe famously once scaled a giant monument in Buenos Aires) and created shows with a dark, subversive edge.

In 1993 James and other LON members left to form De La Guarda, creating wild environmental spectacles that drew thousands in Buenos Aires and toured internationally, a run of several years in New York. In 2002, James split from De La Guarda co-founder Pichon Baldinu to launch Fuerza Bruta, bringing composer Gaby Kerpel, production manager Fabio D'Aquila and other De La Guarda members with him.

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