amilton de azevedo writes about UNARMOURED, by Clara Furey (Canada), presented in the 2024 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

“I’ve found out that there is no way to compete with time / Even being so small, I am not scared anymore / I go around the universe / I found in the other side the beginning – a rebeginning / The world fits right into my eye / If I blink, it spins and day become night” (Tuyo – Infinita, in a free translation of its lyrics)

“We are not endangered when beauty and enchantment of the world makes eyes bright. (…) What we were doesn’t need to be the prophecy of what we will be.“ [Geni Nuñez in Descolonizando afetos (Decolonizing affections), in a free translation]

To embrace erotism as a wholeness, beyond sexualization. UNARMOURED (2024), by Clara Furey, is a planetary conjunction of bodies experiencing themselves as sensual and cosmic beings. The choreographic vocabulary built within the piece ranges from hip-based movement particles that exhales sensuality to playful gestures that are able to embody desire in a broad perspective.

There is sex, there is a strong grip, but there is also some sort of ingenuity of one discovering the world and all the possible relations that are there to pursue, discover, experience. Everything vibrates, from the performers (Furey, Justin De Luna, Be Heintzman Hope and Brian Mendez) bodies to the pulsing living light, designed by Paul Chambers with the assistance of Jordana Natale, that dances through its cycling movement, both in time-passing and atmosphere-building ways.

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UNARMOURED leaves no room for silence nor immobility, as the amazing soundscape by Twin Rising is unstoppable and so are the performers’ livingness. Light, smoke, sound, choreography: the ethereal within meets a terrenal cosmic environment as there is always something yet to become – Furey’s piece is somewhat a formalization of what would look like for a comet to be in love with a star. As of the moment where three performer’s bodies can synchronously act as one, such as a synapsis running through the mind, the idea of oneness is conflicted by the singularity of each stardust-based living being that wanders around the Earth.

Music plays a key part in Furey’s work – which is not a surprise, considering her background. The live spatialization by Twin Rising sets the stage as an universe of its own, expanding itself towards the moment where the theater’s entirety is engulfed and turned into one celestial womb as the audience seats are vibrating to the beats. 

Performers in motion are somewhat perceived as matter and energy at the same time as UNARMOURED dwells into its continuous flow. Sensuality gets reshaped as the singular gestures and tonuses performed are read, misread, reread and transformed. Furey, De Luna, Heintzman and Mendez are perceiving themselves throughout the piece; solos, duos, trios, quartets – the feeling is that what audience witnesses is live-time composition moved by they desires to come close, distantiate and create relations that goes way beyond the daily ones. 

Matter and energy, desire and erotism, feeling and attitude as inseparable ways of being in the world. UNARMOURED proposes sociabilities that relies on our own cosmic origin. It relocates the center of eagerness, love and lust towards the scrutiny of body impulses that accounts for more than the physical body, yet still relies on its possible movement composition. UNARMOURED is where the chaos of creation meets the organization of a cosmology of the self and a pulsating and ungraspable nature of passion.