The Brutal Joy
Performative Lecture by Justine A. Chambers
Saturday, November 9, 2024 | 2:00 PM | FREE
312 Main Street, Vancouver
Registration details to be announced HERE
In this performative lecture, Justine A. Chambers speaks, gestures and dances around and with her current choreographic project, The Brutal Joy. The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. 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. 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.
Co-presented by the Heart of the City festival, 312 Main, and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Biography
Justine A. Chambers is an artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh 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 dances ‘that are already there’ – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her choreographic projects have been hosted at national and international galleries, theatres at festivals including: Toronto Biennial of Art 2024, Libby Leshgold Gallery, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Artspeak, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Agora de la Danse, Festival of New Dance, Mile Zero Dance Society, Dancing on the Edge, Canada Dance Festival, Dance in Vancouver, and The Western Front. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
About Heart of the City Festival
Over 100 events throughout the Downtown Eastside and online!
We are thrilled to announce the upcoming 2024 Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival! For twenty-one years, the Heart of the City Festival has been grounded in the Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community’s cultural practices. The Festival works with, for and about the Downtown Eastside community to carry forward our community’s stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences, and artistic processes to illuminate pathways of resistance and resilience.
Guided by the theme Threads of Connection, the 2024 Festival features 100 plus live and online events showcased at 40 plus local venues over twelve days - both indoors and out – including music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history walks and more.
This 2024 Festival is also a special ‘turning of the wheel year’. As fall rolls into winter and winter rolls into spring, Vancouver Moving Theatre / Heart of the City Festival co-founders Terry Hunter, C.M. and Savannah Walling, C.M. are announcing their retirement as of July 2025 following their final 2024 – 2025 season with Vancouver Moving Theatre.