Photo: Oliver Look
Photo: Oliver Look
One hundred more
Co-Created with Justine A Chambers
Rooted in friendship and alliance, One hundred more is co-authored by Laurie Young and Justine A. Chambers, 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.
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.
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.
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Laurie Young and Justine A. Chambers Light design: Emese Csornai. Sound design: Neda Sanai Costume Design: Sarah Doucet Artistic Support : Josh Hite Rehearsal Direction: Sarah Doucet