Justine A. Chambers: on The Brutal Joy

Movement artist Justine A. Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, which is currently on tour across Canada. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.

Through the choreography of movement, sound, light, and attire, The Brutal Joy mines remembered and imagined pasts to build a relational, living counter-archive in and on her own body in the present.

In this talk, Chambers discusses how the piece oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, letting provisional moments of self-actualization in the present surface through a dance of future possibilities.

Chambers’s choreographic practice is grounded in empathic and collaborative creativity, diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs, and outward-facing activations of a cumulative bodily archive of the everyday. In The Brutal Joy, intergenerational inheritances of movement and personal style are tools for reclaiming Black existence and value through self-determination and collective ritual. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, sonic texture, and shadow serve as materials for imagining otherwise.