Bodies in return: Panzetti & Ticconi’s All’Arme

I keep seeing my grandfather in public. On buses, at café tables, crossing the street. A quiet man, with kind eyes and large, sinewy hands clasped behind his back. It lasts only a moment, until the angle shifts or the light changes. After all, my grandfather died when I was fourteen. Yet in those seconds time and space collapse in intimate familiarity. The secret joy lingers even when reality strikes back. In the perpetual return of resemblance and repetition, nothing truly disappears.

At first glance, Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi’s All’Arme, opening the 2025 Brigittines International Festival in Brussels, has little to do with grandfathers. The piece, they write on their website ‘delves into the tension between individual agency and collective force’. The playful title already evokes a call to arms, alarm-bells ringing and, more poignantly, the hymn of the Italian fascist party (‘All’Armi’).

Dance has long engaged critically with how authoritarianism conditions bodies and movement, fascinated by choreography’s power to order and police the masses. Here as well, the dancers depict the supreme will of the collective and its violent suppression of individualism. However, the overreaching feeling is neither of alarm nor a call to arms against oppressive forces, but the soothing indifference of time passing. A disquietingly pleasant flow of repetitions, micro-adjustments and resemblances frames this impressive one-hour performance, where the fascist collective calls to us with Mephistophelian persuasiveness.

Les Brigittines is a unique stage. The sound rebounds between the austere stone walls of the former chapel, and the tall, narrow room creates a claustrophobic intimacy. The six female performers enter the darkened room from different sides, phone-torches in hand, carefully inspecting the premises. This investigation theme recurs with regular intervals. In the middle of a synchronised march or awkward jazz steps, the light cuts, and the torches ignite. Now, the dancers converge around an individual dancer, strip off her dark overall to reveal the white t-shirt beneath. They carefully inspect her arched body in a scene reminiscent of André Brouillet’s 1887 ‘Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière’, the famous depiction of Jean-Martin Charcot’s lessons demonstrating female hysteria.

A gloomy low-fi soundtrack accompanies the dancers’ sombre coherence. Young professionals of similar age and body-build, dressed in muted grey and black, melt into each other like pieces of an evolving living apparatus. Legs swing like pendulums, arms strike their backs, torsos stand erect like statues. This unity and utility bring to mind a highlight reel of mass ornaments, from the factory-fresh chorus line The Tiller Girls to Mussolini’s fertile and productive ‘new woman’, exemplifying what culture critic Susan Sontag described as fascism’s aestheticisation of politics. Here, choreography seduces the body into ideological alignment.

In fascism, the body is a battlefield. Just as total control seems within reach, miniscule idiosyncrasies penetrate through the cracks: a march veers towards a tap-dance, a right turn morphs to a jazz twist. Panzetti and Ticconi turn the forms of mass choreography onto themselves. Yet it is not the subversive moments of individual assertion that get the final word. Once individuality is established, the others follow, and the idiosyncratic is reabsorbed into the ever-changing will of the collective.

As critical theorist Theodor Adorno knew, fascism keeps returning because it never truly disappears. It is the ghost in the capitalist machinery, haunting the undergrowth of our collective imagination and reappearing like a familiar face glimpsed across the street. All’Arme doubles down on that familiarity, bringing us back to the comfortable centre where the ideological edges are sanded down into smooth forms. The ambiguity comes from body, concept, and ideology. The violent subsumption of individuality is itself a kind of choreography. At one point, shouts and chants of a stadium fill the deep hall of Les Brigittines – is it sports or protest? The distinction collapses.

Suddenly the brutal beat-down of one dancer throws me back to reality. In a flash I see the horrific police beatdowns of protesters in Serbia, my home country, broadcast all over my social media feed one week prior. Yet when the dancers swap places, and each endure the beatdown, the exceptional becomes communal ritual. Violence turns to choreography.

Later, when I return to the programme notes, a single sentence becomes a key through which I frame the work: ‘How can we respond to our need to protect ourselves without becoming a threat ourselves?’ This ambiguous irony runs through the work like a red thread as the fluid violence that subtly shifts and swaps place. Even as the choreography changes, the old mechanisms remain intact. Change and immobility. That quiet dissonance had held me uneasily and fully from beginning to end.

The performance ends where it begins, with the meticulous inspection of a body. More than any powerful call to action, what remains as residue in my body is a sense of unease. This is no call for revolution, not even a condemnation. Instead, it is a careful documentation of the unsettling, all-consuming choreography of conformity. How bodies rebel, align and repeat, how ideology lives imperceptibly in every movement. How the all-too-human desire for safety, self-preservation and love succumbs to the fascist lullaby.

Still, again, always. Perhaps repetition itself becomes a form of truth. At a time when the concept of crisis loops around itself, a parallel comes to mind. Reflecting on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, writer Milan Kundera evokes Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal return’, where history is not linear but a looped spiral, condemning us to relive our history with uncanny precision. But this, in turn, gives life a certain weight: it makes the existential struggle worthwhile. The dead return to us because the end is an impossibility. My grandfather will always return to take the bus. And still we dance. ●