Join Biennial of the Americas for this one night only event. We’re proud to bring dance artist and educator Justine A. Chambers to Denver on November 6 for The Brutal Joy: A Lecture.

Culture Club member tickets available for $15.

Be sure to purchase your tickets before they sell out.

ABOUT

The Brutal Joy: A Lecture

This performative lecture speaks to and with the conceptual and historical underpinnings of Justine A. Chambers' most recent choreographic project, The Brutal Joy, currently touring internationally. Chambers discusses dance and personal style as counter archives; the processes of ritualization and individuation; and the oscillation between the compositional structure of the riff, the vamp and the break as a means to self-actualize in the present to allow a dance of future possibilities to surface. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy: A Lecture unfurls Black vernacular line dance and Black sartorial gesture, in the lineage of Black dandyism, as intellectual discourse, reverie and devotion to Black Living.

Chambers’s choreographic practice is grounded in empathic and collaborative creation, diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs, and outward-facing activations of a cumulative bodily archive of the everyday. In this work, intergenerational inheritances of movement and personal style are tools for reclaiming Black existence and value through self-determination and collective ritual. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, sonic texture, and shadow serve as materials for imagining otherwise.

This presentation is made possible with support from Denver Arts & Venues and Consulate General of Canada.