Review: Two men celebrate maleness in 'Still Standing You'

A scene in the college football movie The Program depicts two facepaint-sporting defensive players firing each other up by butting chests, pounding shoulder pads, and then spitting in each other's mouths.

You don't need to have played football to understand it or to not see it as disgusting - you just need to have grown up as a boy. Still Standing You, Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido's Fringe Festival exploration of masculinity, shows that you needn't be an American boy to understand it either.

For 45 minutes, Belgian-born Ampe and Portuguese Garrido wrestle, trade punches, whip each other viciously with their belts, and collide in a contest of wills that impresses with its realism, the beauty of its physicality, and the depth of its meaning and insight.

On a bare stage, Ampe wails loudly and drools like a zombie from The Walking Dead, twirling or rearranging his excellent beard before charging head-first to nearly knock Garrido into a row of lights. Garrido responds by taking a few quick steps and then executing a flying drop-kick that sends Ampe sprawling across the floor.

On display is a desire to humiliate, to dominate, to conquer, and more important, to bond (and I would argue, to show affection and support) through all these mechanisms.

The dominance, I should point out, extends to each other's genitals, which are treated as something no less than a wrist or ankle - a point of grappling, torture, humiliation (and also for some interlocked dance sequences as well, much to the imagined chagrin of whoever once said, "You can't choreograph a penis").

Though Garrido attempts too much humor in his narrations, his natural timing elicits enough laughs to puncture the rhythm of combat, and, as the evening progresses, the pair poke fun at a number of tropes in ballet and contemporary dance.

At one point, Garrido pins Ampe to the floor, his knees digging into the latter's chest, and teases Ampe by letting strands of saliva dangle from his mouth toward Ampe's face. It contains all the emotional and artistic significance of a wet willy (and any former boy can attest that can carry a ton of significance).

But when Still Standing You culminates in a pair of interlocked bodies, supporting one another in slowly changing poses of sublime beauty, well, the spit and the beatings manifest the esprit de combat of two boy-men who don't necessarily indulge the prettiest ways to show their deep, mutual support and regard.