UK premiere of The Brutal Joy, a scored improvisation choreographed by Justine A. Chambers, presented as part of the THIS IS DANCE season.
Justine A. Chambers brings The Brutal Joy to ACE Dance and Music on Friday 16 October and Saturday 17 October, and it's a UK premiere. The piece is a scored improvisation that grew out of traces of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, and it unfurls Black vernacular line dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism. Chambers describes it as working as intellectual discourse, reverie and devotion to Black-living.
Framed as a counter-archival practice, the work offers a way 'of knowing the past in excess of the fictions of the archive' — a quote from Christina Sharpe. It serves as 'the other citation': a collection of footnotes, physical anecdote as theory and an otherwise imagining, a reservoir for inherited gesture, individual and collective affective memories and under-documented histories. Fierce calls Chambers 'an iconic figure within the Canadian contemporary dance scene'.
The Brutal Joy is part of THIS IS DANCE, an international season of dance in Birmingham presented in partnership with Fabric, Birmingham Hippodrome, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Fierce Festival, Midlands Arts Centre and Sampad Arts. It's one of several performances coming to the city as part of the season.
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ACE Dance and Music is at 54-57 Floodgate Street, Digbeth, B5 5SL. There are two performances: Friday 16 October at 7:30pm and Saturday 17 October at 5:00pm, with tickets ranging from £12 to £40.
