The Brutal Joy
Mile Zero Dance presents:
The Brutal Joy
Justine Chambers (Vancouver)
A scored improvisational performance with collaborators James Proudfoot and Mauricio Pauly that activates Black line dance and Black style as embodied thought, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.
This show will run for two evenings!
Friday, April 24 + Saturday, April 25
7:30 PM
$30/$35
Location:
MILE ZERO DANCE
9931 78 Ave NW
Edmonton, AB
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
–Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. As a scored improvisation for dance, light, and sound, The Brutal Joy explores these diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs and outward facing, physically dialogic activations that allow for actualizing oneself at present in a dance of future possibilities. The performers’ attention oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, while attending to the mutually dependent processes of individuation and ritualization. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, textural sound, shadow, and light are the materials for proposing “What if?” and “Now what?” as provisional questions towards imagining otherwise. Centering dance and attire as relational and living counter-archives, the work considers movement and personal style as tools for self-determination and the collective reclamation of Black humanitarian value.
Choreography and performance: Justine A. Chambers
Sound design and performance: Mauricio Pauly
Lighting design and performance: James Proudfoot
Dramaturgy: Vanessa Kwan
Garments by: Old Fashioned Standards
The Brutal Joy has been created with the support of the Periculum Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, The Can Dance Network, Agora de la Danse, The Dance Centre, The National Arts Centre, and Toronto Dance Theatre.
Featuring
Justine A. Chambers
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation.