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 Edouard Glissant, “ the right to opacity”.
In Conversation
Laurie: We’ve been busy working through our allyship to specific personal and iconic gestures of political resistance and using rhythm and repetition to feel the force of the gestures in the studio as a way to uncover different forms. Feeling the force might find it’s way as an emotional connection or response to a specific gesture. With the gestures where we feel charge, we dwell within these forms to see what other physical traces emerge. The container for much of our work is the “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture and the micro movements that lead up to and fall off after that recognizable gesture.
Justine: I think when you have two women of color in front of you working with the force of a gesture again and again and again, the dancing the gesture is less about making it into dance and instead about how to see it again and do it again and feel it again. Committing to continue to revisit it and imbue it with whatever is available to us in the moment or whatever we’ve previously inscribed for ourselves.I’ve been thinking a lot about opacity and for me it’s less about a mask or veneer or a blocking or as shade. But more about an action, a way of being.
Opacity as another standard of measurement that relates to action, that relates to rhythm and that relates to repetition.
Laurie: There are moments in our movement sequences that feel very readable and
then moments where we work with opacity. We think through the words of Édouard Glissant and “the right to opacity for everyone”. Within this opacity lies the desire for these unknowable micro-gestures, or as Erin Manning might say “minor gestures”, to have their own agency and also for us to bear our rights to be unreadable for every gaze. So what gestures are legible and illegible keeps shifting. And this also has to do with the metric. We are in this world of finding pathways into gestures, those pathways may not be readable. There are gestures that some gazes are not privy to understand.
BIOS
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.
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 & 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 theater, museum and city. Laurie has been busy with interdisciplinary projects between arts and science and is a fellow of Volkswagen Foundations Arts and Science and Motion.
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.
CREDITS
Concept, Choreography, Performance: LAURIE YOUNG AND JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS
Light design: EMESE CSORNAI
Composition, Sound design: NEDA SANAI
Costume Design: SARAH DOUCET
Artistic Support : JOSH HITE
Rehearsal Direction & Dramaturgy: SARAH DOUCET
Outside Eye: Sergiu Matis
Production: M.I.C.A. – MOVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Thank you: Bruno Pocheron, Kemi Craig, Lee Su-Feh
A PRODUCTION BY LAURIE YOUNG + JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS in co-production with the Visiting Dance Artist Program, a joint initiative of the National Arts Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts, Agora de la Danse – Montreal, and SOPHIENSÆLE.
Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, Dance Victoria’s Chrystal Dance Prize, British Columbia Arts Council and the Goethe – Institut.
MEDIA PARTNER: Taz. die Tageszeitung
Justine A. Chambers 