One Hundred More is a performance urgently informed by our current socio-political climate which has produced an ever-greater groundswell of bodies resisting, moving in collective anger, revolt and counter-resistance, captured and replayed in an endless torrent of images. Centred on an iconic gesture of resistance, the work is an incremental choreography of personal physical strategies the artists deploy as women of colour and mothers. Chambers and Young acknowledge their personal stories of resistance are both individual and part of a shared autobiography: an accumulation of gesture, rhythm, grief, and joy deeply inscribed in their flesh. Drawing from their subjectively held memory bank of protest images, they investigate the possible incremental micro-movements leading up to a recognizable expression of resistance. This work creates a steadily mounting tension of rhythm through archival and emergent movements. Set to a pulsating score, this performance is a physical declaration of resistance and friendship. Following this performance of One Hundred More, a talkback with Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young will be moderated by Seika Boye. — Ticket Information:
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This program is a part of Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry, a performance series in which artists investigate the body as a living archive, exploring both its extraordinary strength and resilience, as well as its tenderness, vulnerability, and limitations. Image credit: One Hundred More, Justine A. Chambers & Laurie Young, 2019. Sophiensaele Berlin. Photography: Oliver Look. |
November 29
8:00pm – 9:30pm
Artist Bio
Justine A. Chambers
Justine A. Chambers (1975; she/her/hers) 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 considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her most recent works are activations of the aesthetic practices of Black vernacular line dance and Black dandyism as de-colonial imaginings. Her choreography is concerned with the provisional questions: “What If?” And “Now what?” as processes towards imagining otherwise. Chambers’s work has been hosted by Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Western Front, Sophiensaele (Berlin), National Arts Centre, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at University of British Columbia, Tek Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Artspeak Hong Kong Performing Arts Festival, Agora de la Danse, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and Art Museum at University of Toronto. She was the recipient of the Lola Dance Award (2017), Chrystal Dance Prize (2017 & 2023) and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2023. She is currently an instructor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and completing an MFA in interdisciplinary art. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Artist Bio
Laurie Young
Laurie Young is a Berlin based Canadian dance artist who focuses on the embodiment of unauthorised histories and their representation and how relationships are choreographed between human and other than human beings in the theatre, museum and city. Laurie embraces an expanded notion of choreography as a way of observing organisational patterns between bodies, of framing or revealing hierarchies. She has been working in transdisciplinary projects across the fields of dance studies, sensory ethnography and archival practices. Her artistic development continues to evolve, informed increasingly by the politics of the diasporic body, its archival liveliness and its choreography.
Her career as a dancer saw her working with many international choreographers including Sasha Waltz, Meg Stuart, Benoit Lachambre, Eszter Salomon, Nasser Martin Gousset and Hannah Hegenscheidt. Laurie (with Justine A. Chambers) was named Visiting Dance artist of the National Arts Centre and she was the 2019-2020 recipient of the Tanzpraxis scholarship of the Senatverwaltung für Kultur und Europa. She was also a multiple recipient of “Arts and Science and Motion” fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation. Her work has been presented at the Sophiensaele, Martin Gropius Bau, The Australian Museum, National Arts Centre, The Field Museum, Agora de la danse amongst others. She is currently studying somatic trauma therapy and embodied activism in a social justice context.
Artist Bio
Seika Boye
Seika Boye (b. 1975, Hamilton; she/her) is a writer, scholar, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto.
Seika has worked as a modern/postmodern dance artist; an archives and publishing assistant; and dance writer and editor for various publications. She continues to work as a curator, dramaturg, and consultant.
Dedicated to public scholarship, Seika curated the award-winning archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now. She is a Co-Investigator/Co-Director of Gatherings: Oral and Archival Histories of Performance (SSHRC).