Dropping the armour

The following text transcribes a conversation between Clara Furey, dramaturg Aïsha Sasha John and performer Justin De Luna. Together they talk about the seeds of UNARMOURED.

Aïsha – I’m going to record. I checked the file, and it works, so we’re good.

Clara – Okay. I’m still going to do it with my phone in case.

A – Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. I like the idea of you starting from your belly, and then finding your way to the thing from a new pathway, maybe.

C – I will. So, okay. I think about memories of eroticism, as a child...around five years old. There were two twins that I used to play with that were a bit older, Lorraine and Rachel, two twins that were living in the countryside.

And we used to play in a waterbed together. I think these are my first memories of what being in a space together that felt unsteady, unstable and really good felt like.

There was an erotic play between the three of us. And they were kind of introducing me to, “oh, lay on your belly on this water and just feel how good it feels.”

And this has always stuck with me ‘til this day as a high point of how powerful energy works, and just how little is needed, and how abstract things can be, while still being very sexual in a way. It was the discovery of sexual pleasure for me.

The waterbed felt like a raft in the ocean. We could interact in a way that wasn’t even role playing, that was just about laying there and moving on it, and letting the weight of one’s movement reach the other. And that kind of struck me as a place I’d like to go back to in terms of sensations and feelings, and in terms of freedom and shamelessness.

It was playful. It was communal, also. We were water like...

This sensation has spilled into my way of being in this work. We are together, but we are also very alone, and okay with it. Okay with connecting to our own true selves, with- out completely forgetting or acknowledging the presence of others.

A – Yeah, that’s, yeah.

C – Although it’s not what you’d look for on the stage, it was, for me, a space I’ve given myself in the last two years to reflect on, how do I want to re-inhabit my body. How do I want to reconnect with my pleasure? And how do I want to let go of certain layers of how I should be?

A – It’s true that that kind of play or the invitation to be sensual together kind of gets cornered off into sex, or other kinds of play that are sanctioned, or sports, which is obviously very physical and sensual.

Not that sex doesn’t have play, but you choose who to have sex with based on your desire for them, whereas in childhood, it’s erotic just to have the encounter with the object or the earth or whatever it is.

I’m just echoing back or mirroring back a bit what you’re saying to you, in the hopes that it’ll keep the associations going. But this thing about it being individual but communal, that you aren’t ashamed to allow that much pleasure to occur in your body in the company of others, because you don’t know that you’re supposed to be ashamed yet.

C – Wait, sorry. I realize people are arriving. I’m going to move space, so I’m going to pause this.

A – Okay. Yeah.

C – I’ll move to another space because I want the recording to go well. Wait a second. I’ll find a close space nearby.

A – Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C – Hi everyone.

A – Hi.

Justin – Hi.

C – I’m going to move space so that you can talk freely, and I can talk freely. Everybody can talk freely. It’s nice.

J – Love you.

A – Love you.

C – Am I okay now?

A – Yeah, you’re okay now. But you know what? I’m glad that you moved, what I really want to know is, what has been hard for you about accessing this erotic energy or being with this material? How has it been hard?

C – Not falling into performativity, being real...that’s been challenging. Letting go of wanting to please, letting all of that go is a bit like jumping into the void, or it’s like accept- ing that you’re going to die alone. I don’t know how to say it really. It’s like, I’m alone with this. It’s my own thing. I’m riding my own invisible horse.

A – But now I’m curious about, in terms of the arc of the work, are you tracing the arc? Or what is the relationship between whatever arc you think may or may not be there and this question of armor? I guess I’m wondering is, are we seeing them slowly come off? Are we seeing an unarmored body?

C – I’m thinking about Brian, who wrote something beautiful about the work that he shared with us, that he enters the stage coming back from a battle that he lost, and he left his armor there. He dropped it, it’s gone. And he doesn’t care, because he’s going to now build a new one from the inside. A – We need hardness. Hardness is not bad. We don’t want a spine made of jelly. Right?

C – In the arc of the piece, I don’t think we’re going to see us unarmor in a linear way. I think we’re going to see bits of armor being removed, and we’re going to see bits being rebuilt.

I don’t see it as a slow reveal of softness. I mean, like time which is circular, bits appear bits fall, and it allows for different configurations of eroticism to emerge.

A – you mentioned that there’s some gaps or there’s some transitions that you’re still working on. Given the nature of the material, has it felt tricky to move from that?

C – Very tricky. How do you even get out of a water bed? What is a resolution? How do you say I’m done? Because there is no end game. There is no orgasm. So what is it?

I’ve been thinking about it that way: “Well, it’s not the end, or it’s not moving on, it’s just relocating into a different universe, into a new setup”

So, that’s been my strategy. Because otherwise, we could never get off the floor. There was no way out of this water.

A – Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we also get bored and we get tired. Things end.

C – Yes. That’s it, in that sense. We’re not infinite. We’re finite. We have a finite amount of concentration.