Subway Breakdancers, Clad in Armor, Go Medieval at the Met Museum

NEW YORK — Out of nowhere, the clang of armor and the beat of hip-hop music boomed through a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tourists who had been peering at filigreed shields and wrought-iron broadswords swung toward the sound.

There, beside a cluster of horse statues in armor, a dancer moved into a handstand — one-handed by necessity. On his free hand, he wore a gleaming silver gauntlet, which he shimmied off and placed on the floor so that it stood upright like the disembodied hand of a knight.

Above the medieval-style metal glove, he spun, he kicked, he flipped.

Then, he fistbumped it.

For New Yorkers, busking dance troupes on the subways have been a spectacle (or scourge) since the 1980s, when they first began appearing on moving trains.

But this performance at the museum was not a guerrilla-style takeover of the medieval gallery.

The dancers popping and locking in rehearsals in the gallery for the past several months — some in chain mail, others in helmets and breastplates — have collaborated with the curators of the museum’s arms and armor collection in an attempt to bring the ancient battle gear alive.

Unlike most of the museum’s collection, such as the friezes and statuary, oil paintings and watercolors, armor is made to move, not sit static in a display case.

Kester Estephane, one of the dancers, who wears a breastplate and gauntlets in the shows, found suiting up in the armor added a layer of empowerment.

“To take the opportunity from the Met to take these lovely pieces of armor and slap these bad boys on and actually move within them and see how they feel and see how they work, it’s almost like a dream come true,” said Estephane, who is known as Flexx when he dances.

He added: “Yes, I am not actually a knight — I don’t have the sword or work for a king — but just having the armor on is enough for me to be able to experience what it is that I felt and experienced in the fantasy that I had when I was younger.”

The result is a series of five performances that began last month and will end in early February where dancers face off wearing the thick steel of (replica) armor in gallery 371, the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Arms and Armor Court. The next performance is on Nov. 9, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Two more are scheduled for this winter, Jan. 11 and Feb. 8.

The collaboration was the brainchild of Pierre Terjanian, the curator in charge of the arms and armor collection, who was trying to figure out how to show the collection as its craftsmen intended — in motion.

He found there is precedent: In 1924, the Met produced a silent film about a suit of armor that posits the question, “Does your knight ever come to life in ghostly moonlight?” (Spoiler alert: It does, stepping forth from its display case to ride a horse around Central Park.)

He presented the idea to Limor Tomer, the general manager of MetLiveArts, the museum’s performance branch, who hit upon the Showtime dancers, with the joustlike pomp of their public dance battles, as the perfect vehicle.

As they explored the project, the pair — and the dancers themselves — all said they were surprised to discover just how complementary the urban discipline is to the culture in which armor was steeped.

“There are amazing parallels that exist between the chivalry and the cultural history as well as object history, and the modern world of hip-hop and street dance,” Tomer said.

The armor can be seen as an extension of the rap battle, a staple in hip-hop culture in which artists and dancers compete, essentially for bragging rights.

“When I heard about this type of battling with the armor, and our type of battling with dance, it was very similar,” said Christopher Brathwaite, one of the dancers.

As the curators explained the ritualized ways knights would suit up in armor, Brathwaite said he saw a parallel in the way that breakdancers prepare dance battles, practice sessions called labbing.

“We don’t know what the opponent was preparing or putting on, or getting ready to do,” he said. “But we would put our best out, as they would put their best out.”

The narrative aspects of dance battles, where stories or emotions are often telegraphed through motion, align with what Terjanian, the curator, sees as the storytelling power of armor, the battles or legendary men each hand-forged suit commemorates.

“Armor was essentially formal wear for high-powered men, and it helped fashion men’s identity,” Terjanian said.

The dance battles represent both the most au courant display of the museum’s oldest collection, and perhaps the subway artists’ most elevated performance yet.

They also mark an evolution and mainstream embrace of a street dance phenomenon that began by flouting city rules: Dancing for money on the subway is in fact illegal.

In 2015, a South Bronx-based nonprofit, Dancing in the Streets, launched It’s Showtime NYC, a program to bolster the art form and create pathways for the dancers to perform legally in other venues. ( Estephane is associate artistic director of the group.)

To prepare for the performance, some of the organization’s roughly 30-person-strong dance crew has attended lectures on chivalry and ancient battle etiquette at the museum hosted by curators, and studied the provenance and historical import of the suits of armor in the Met’s collection, which was obtained in 1896.

“When I first heard about the project, and they said, ‘You’re going to be dancing and performing in armor,’ I was like, ‘Armor?'” said Brathwaite, who goes by Venxm when he dances an angular style known as bone-breaking. “When I put the gauntlets on, and started bone-breaking and pulling at my arms, I thought, ‘This feels great.'”