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 …