Ep. 67 - What the Dance Holds (The Brutal Joy)

Gabrielle Martin chats with Justine A. Chambers about The Brutal Joy, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and Justine discuss:  How did you develop this work? What is the significance of and approach to the presentation of the black body? How is this work an anticolonial imagining? What kinds of knowing and being become possible through the act of dance? What is bodily sovereignty and why is it important around the figure of the black dandy? What is the importance of style and the expression of the self through fashion and clothing? How does the call-and-response structure of the show affect collaboration and its meaning? About The Brutal Joy Dance as archive. Style as philosophy. The Brutal Joy slides between ritual and rebellion—part groove, part revelation, all liberation. An improvisational act of devotion to Black-living, The Brutal Joy merges Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture, transforming social dance and self-styling into an embodied living library of self-determination. Within its scored improvisation for dance, light, and sound, performers riff, vamp, and break—tracing the syncopations between individuality and collectivity, ritual and rebellion. As light carves the body and shadows echo back, The Brutal Joy unfolds as both performance and inquiry: a living counter-archive where gesture becomes knowledge and attire holds history. At once reverent and radical, it embodies the bodily sovereignty of the Black dandy and the communal vitality of the Electric Slide. What emerges is a choreography of becoming—radiant, self-determined, and alive to the possibilities of another future. About Justine Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator.  Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. Her research attends to embodied archives, social choreographies, and choreography and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself. Credits PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. Show Transcript