Armour

Published on 22 October 2024

Dressed as wrestlers, three acrobats examine virility in the aim of offering new perspectives on the question.

Surrounding them in a circle, the audience watches as scenes of profound intimacy unfold in a tender, natural way that makes them entirely relatable.

In this body-to-body encounter, the performers touch, clutch, and carry each other. They use armor made from sports protective equipment, not to keep the other person at a distance, but, on the contrary, to make contact with them.

As they play with balancing and hand-to-hand acrobatics, they allow themselves to slip into relationships of seduction and redefined masculinity. The result is a representation of a love that is free and generous, universal and plural.

Arno Ferrera and Gilles Polet collaborated for the first time in 2021 on Cuir, a show for two performers that was created by the company Un loup pour l’homme to question notions of masculinity. With Armour, produced by the Les Halles de Schaerbeek cultural centre in Brussels, they explore this theme in greater depth, developing an acrobatic language based on notions of exhaustion.