The mood is grim at the overture of Arno Ferrera and Gilles Polet’s ARMOUR, an hour-long dance-circus piece presented at Brussels’ Les Halles de Schaerbeek during festival Hors Pistes 24. While the lights are still down, audio recordings reproduce screams of torture. A chilling beginning for a piece that later appears as a display of masculinity, with cocky games of domination and surrender. The dark opening scene sets an undertone that lingers, casting the remainder of the piece in a dubious light. It’s a reminder that things can not be taken at face value. Something weighs on this excessive virility.
Ferrera and Polet’s accomplice Charlie Hession enters the stage first. This blonde adonis is surrounded by spectators on three sides, with lightboxes in between the stands that shine bright contrasting hues onto him. The plastic-looking dancefloor blends shapes and shades into an impressionistic reflection, like a phantom pressed against the glass ceiling of a trippy underworld.
Hession wears a pink-blue wrestling singlet and knee pads, which protect him while he contests his shadow, throwing his own muscular body against the floor. A second wrestler appears, Ferrera in flashy orange, then Pollet in purple. They take turns fighting each other. Sequences go by of shoulder throwing, body slams, pressing each other down and rolling around – it hurts to watch. Their intense physical violence is interrupted by moments of care. The wrestling transforms into hugging. When their blows hit harder than intended, they check in with each other: ‘Are you okay?’ Quickly the performers snap between these modes of aggression and affection.
The threesome undresses each other to reveal black jockstraps. Like athletes, they apply chalk on their palms, before grabbing each other’s crotch, which they use as a fulcrum to bend their bodies back. More nutty, amusing acts follow, like a synchronized boyband choreo to a folkloric flute song. There’s a sense of anything-is-possible, a children’s playground in adult-rated, hedonistic guise. Tight-fitting spandex singlets reveal the dancer’s curves, armour pieces give them superhero proportions. With ARMOUR, directors Ferrera and Polet test the effects and defects of these bodily enhancements, often instrumentalised in the gay community to escape from oneself, from one’s insecurities and forbidden desires.
