JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS
The Brutal Joy – performance and choreography
update
︎March 2025
Performed at l’Agora de la danse — March 26th to 29th, 2025.The score for The Brutal Joy requires a sensitive attention towards both the autonomy of each performer, while staying tethered and responsive to each other, and the aggregation of gestures placed in the performance space by all performers. One strategy has been to develop choreographic methods to diffuse and disperse rhythm through each of our gestures. The rhythm intermixes between varying levels of audibility, visibility and sensibility, and we attend to rhythm collectively as an imperfect and embodied undertaking.
Light, darkness, and shadow are active performers in The Brutal Joy. The lighting states created by Proudfoot, preempt, echo, distill, and add dimension to the movement and sound. Proudfoot works with shadow to consider visibility, reveal an emotional underbelly, explore the expansive potential of each movement and postural gestures, create multiple permutations of my body, and nod to ancestral presence moving through my gestures by casting several simultaneous shadows. The shadow elongates, figures and disfigures, marks time, holds rhythm, dances, and indicates that both the background and the foreground hold equal importance. The black out creates gaps, hollows, opacity, and privacy. Proudfoot nods to what can’t and won’t be known by all witnesses, while simultaneously marking its presence.
Justine A. Chambers
project
The Brutal Joy is the final part of the Heirloom Suite, a four-part series of performances that wields the materiality of Black Vernacular dance and Black Sartorial gesture as physical cogitation, reverie, and devotion to Black-Living. The Brutal Joy is a porous repository of the three previous works Tailfeather (2018), Archives and Heirlooms (2022) and Heirloom inaugurated in March 2023 at the Ellen Gallery, Concordia University. Each work speaks through each other and this final utterance is envisioned as a scored improvisational performance for sound, light and dance performed by Mauricio Pauly (composer and musician), James Proudfoot (lighting designer) and Chambers as an antiphonal relational collaboration. The work posits Black dandyism and the Electric Slide as practices and mutable containers that embody self-sovereignty and affirm Black-living. The series and this upcoming performance emerge from the premise that the embodied archive is already there. It is the source of the collaborators creative material and supports their choices in the act of improvisation. Central to Black vernacular dance and music is the value that improvisation is composition allowing our archives to speak and act when and as needed.
Support in artistic practice — 2024.
PRAcTIcE and biography
Justine A. Chambers is a bi-racial Black dance artist and educator living on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Her movement-based practice sifts through an archive of dance heirlooms, both inherited through family and learned through a life as a contemporary dancer. Her artistic practice and research is a collaboration with, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual art practices; it rests on attending to individual and collective embodied archives. She is dedicated to situating her work in relation (eg. to a wide range of performance spaces, urban planning, architecture, governance structures, intended and unintended audiences, and other art practices), always within the context of the present.
www.justineachambers.com
www.justineachambers.com