"I am Arno Verbruggen (they/them), a Brussels-based interdisciplinary artist working across dance, choreography, directing, and performance. Born in Namur in 1997, I graduated from Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam and began my professional trajectory with Club Guy & Roni’s Poetic Disasters Club in Groningen before joining Aura Dance Theatre in Lithuania. Since 2020, I have developed an independent artistic practice while collaborating with artists and institutions such as Maison the Faux, Romeo Castellucci, Stef Van Looveren, and Action Zoo Humain / Chokri Ben Chikha. Alongside these collaborations, I create my own choreographic works, including SODOM and my current research project HYACINTH.
My work explores queer mythologies as sources of movement, imagination, and dramaturgy. I am interested in how ancient, religious, and collective narratives continue to shape contemporary bodies, identities, and desires. Through choreography, I investigate how the body can become a site where memory, fiction, ritual, intimacy, and politics intersect. Rather than reproducing stories, I use mythology as a compositional tool to generate physical states, images, and emotional tensions that resonate with contemporary life. Politics, for me, begins in the body. It exists in the way we move through public space, express gender, experience pleasure, vulnerability, shame, or care. Because of this, my work often comments on current social and political issues indirectly through embodiment rather than through explicit discourse. I am particularly interested in questioning dominant representations of queer identities and exposing how historical narratives—especially religious or mythological ones—have produced norms around beauty, morality, gender, and desire. By reclaiming these narratives through performance, I try to create spaces where other forms of intimacy, coexistence, and freedom can emerge. I believe art can affect societal issues by creating emotional and sensory experiences that shift perception. I do not see art as a tool that delivers direct answers, but as a space where audiences can collectively experience ambiguity, contradiction, empathy, and transformation. Through immersive and interdisciplinary performances that combine movement, text, sound, and visual language, I hope to invite audiences into encounters that are simultaneously poetic, critical, sensual, and political. In that sense, I see art as a form of soft activism: a way to reimagine how we relate to bodies, histories, and each other.
I make art because it allows me to transform complexity into shared experience. It is a way to process the world while also imagining other possibilities within it. For me, art is deeply connected to freedom: the freedom to invent new languages, new relationships, and new ways of existing together."