Dance as political tool: Rooted in friendship and alliance, One hundred more is the first collaborative work of Laurie Young and Justine A. Chambers. As women of colour and mothers, the two dancers question how power structures have inscribed themselves into their bodies – and what movement is possible within these forms. Working with opacity, they channel iconic and personal gestures of political resistance. Instead of the gestures as a whole they place the micro-movements leading up to them in the center of their dance practice. This illegibility activates the forms themselves as a resistance.

ROOTED IN FRIENDSHIP AND ALLIANCE, One hundred more is co-authored by Laurie Young and Justine A. Chambers, and created in collaboration with Emese Csornai, Neda Sanai and Sarah Doucet. This work is urgently informed by our current socio-political climate, which has produced an ever-greater groundswell of racialized bodies resisting, moving in collective anger, revolt and counter-resistance, captured and replayed in an endless torrent of images. Through incremental and iterative actions, an iconic gesture of political resistance becomes the site to house quotidian physical strategies for resistance as embodied by two women of colour. The gestural vocabulary of this work is simultaneously archival and emergent allowing the notion of the minor gesture, as articulated by Erin Manning, to inform action and structure.

“The major is a structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value. The minor is a force that courses through it, unmorring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards”. (Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture)

Through the emergence of the minor gesture from rhythmic repetition, Young and Chambers invoke the illegible and in the words of Édouard Glissant, “the right to opacity”

JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS is a dance 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. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

EMESE CSORNAI studied architecture at the Technical University of Budapest and fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (BA 2009). Her research in fine arts lead her to lighting design, which two principles keep informing each other in her work as a practicing lighting designer. http://emesecsornai.com

SARAH DOUCET has spent the majority of her life as a performer, choreographer, rehearsal director, dramaturge and costume designer for various Canadian contemporary dance companies, (The Holy Body Tattoo, Vancouver; Animals of Distinction, Montreal, to name her favourites). A recent shift of focus has since led to full time costume designing for various theatre and dance companies across Canada, and for the first time, Berlin.

NEDA SANAI is a Berlin based DJ and Producer, their artistic practice moves along a hybrid of various media such as audio, video and performance. Essentially conceiving a mixed media world where the sonic experience is the onset.

LAURIE YOUNG is a choreographer and dancer whose work focuses on the embodiment of unauthorized histories and their representation. Her work brings into focus how relationships are choreographed between human and other than human beings in the theatre, museum and city. Laurie has been busy with interdisciplinary projects between arts and science and is a fellow of Volkswagen Foundations Arts and Science in Motion.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1403