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.
Read Emily Lyth’s article in Stir, Arts & Culture Vancouver | In The Brutal Joy, Justine A. Chambers channels the overwhelming beauty of Black living
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.
Mauricio Pauly
Mauricio Pauly is a composer, performer and producer of hybrid (instrumental/electronic/amplified) music. As an active cross-disciplinary collaborator, his work includes numerous projects with writers, coders, designers, choreographers and theatre-makers.
His music has been featured by festivals that include Ultima Festival (Norway, 2011), Warsaw Autumn (Poland, 2013), Darmstadt International Summer Courses (Germany, 2010/12/14/16), Le Bruit de la Musique (France, 2014), Images Sonores Festival (Belgium, 2015), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik (Austria, 2016) and Open Ears Festival (Canada 2018).
Collaborations include live-performed music and sound design for Athina Rachel Tsangari’s production of Wedekind's LULU in a sold-out 10-show run at the 2017 Salzburg Festival, Theatre Replacement's Do You Mind If I Sit here? (Vancouver 2021), NiNi Dongnier's Silent Flight (Shanghai, 2023) and his recent creation with Justine Chambers, James Proudfoot and Vanessa Kwan, The Brutal Joy (Vancouver, 2024). FREAM AD WALL, written in collaboration with programmer and 3D animator, Gabriel Montagné, was performed by Line Upon Line Percussion as a 3-show premiere in Austin, TX and toured Europe and the UK in Fall 2019.
Pauly spent the summer of 2018 as an awarded Artist Fellow at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, Italy). In 2017 he was Composer-in-Residence at Villa Romana (Florence, Italy) undertaking a two-part creation and performance residency. During 2014-2015 he relocated to Cambridge, MA (US) thanks to a year-long fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Pauly is a founding honorary member of UK-based ensemble, Distractfold and was the group's artistic co-director until 2021.
Pauly is an Associate Professor at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, Canada. Previously, he taught at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK (2007-2020) and at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, UK (2011-2019). He has given workshops and masterclasses at McGill University, New York University, Brussels Royal Conservatory, Bath Spa University and Huddersfield University.
Mauricio was born and raised in San José, Costa Rica. Since 2017, his home and studio are in Vancouver, Canada.
Photo credit: Green Yang
James Proudfoot
James Proudfoot is a lighting designer/director based in Vancouver, Canada.
He is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, where he received his initial theatre training. Self-taught in the realm of dance lighting, he has contributed designs to many artists and companies over the past 25 years.
James is grateful to live and work on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.