Solidarity and resistance drive the rhythms of Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young's One hundred more
The pair drew on Black Lives Matter and other movements for the gestural language of a new duet
One hundred more with Laurie Young (left) and Justine A. Chambers. Photo by Gianmarco Bresadola
One hundred more is at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on October 13 and 14
WITH ITS INTENSE, repeated gestures drawn from street protests, Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young’s powerful new duet One hundred more would seem to speak directly to the upheaval of the past few years. In a relentless, driving rhythm, fists pull back, legs lunge and brace, and arms lift to the sky.
In fact, the work has been in development for seven years—a sign that the unrest around Black Lives Matter, police violence, and other issues was happening long before the pandemic—a fact that’s easy to forget in these divided times.
When the pair started working on One hundred more, BLM was already in full swing, as was the “Hands up, don’t shoot” movement in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in the U.S. And they started digging into the physical language of those mass protests.
“We were looking at a lot of scholarly articles about gestures of resistance; we looked at a lot of photojournalism of resistance,” Young tells Stir in an interview over the phone with Chambers before rehearsal at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, where their piece makes its Vancouver debut. “Then, also, there were the umbrellas in Hong Kong, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.”
“We were interested in the body in resistance and how it’s weaponized,” explains Chambers.
As much as that research informed the work, its starting point was personal experience, as Vancouver-based Chambers and Berlin-based Canadian Young connected in the studio. The veteran dance artists, who met about a decade ago, put funding from Victoria’s 2015 Chrystal Dance Prize toward developing the piece.
“It was always about being racialized women,” Chambers says. “We are the subject and the content is our own lives.”
“It was, ‘How do these gestures live in us?’” says Young, who’s in Canada for the Vancouver show, as well as the piece’s tour to Ottawa and Montreal later this fall, “and then bringing them into our bodies to reveal our own sort of experiences.”
Part of that personal history in the piece is motherhood; both Chambers and Young are parents to boys. And it doesn’t escape them, that these days, motherhood is an act of resistance in itself.
“Especially in the dance milieu!” says Chambers, adding of her generation in the Vancouver dance scene: “So many of us had babies around the same time. We kind of insisted on it in a different way than those who were 10 years older than we were, who had to refuse it.
“It was with the birth of Max where I felt like my career took off,” Chambers adds, referring to her now seven-year-old son. “I feel like all my making in the last seven years is because of Max. Also, as mothers, we do a lot of ignored, invisible labour. And as POCs we do an extraordinary amount of ignored labour.”
Chambers says One hundred more—carefully developed over the years between Berlin and Vancouver, and frequently online as the pandemic hit—is equal parts improvised and structured. The piece builds incrementally to a crescendo—resulting in an endurance test for the performers.
“I had to do a few cardio workouts to do it—it has been three years!” says Young with a laugh. “It’s not the kind of performance where you just drop in half way. We have to run the whole thing; we can’t run just sections every time. It’s pretty unrelenting in its way.”
“I have to admit I never feel fatigued doing it, having my sister there beside me,” Chambers responds. Referring to the live lighting and sound by Emese Csornai and Victoria Cheong, respectively, she adds: “There’s a reciprocity between the four of us of support. It’s a four-hander—there’s a solidarity and care; it’s a practice of joy and love.”
It becomes a process, and performance, that somehow embodies struggle, resistance, solidarity, and strength in ways that words simply can’t capture.
“We work with repetition—it’s not so much about us presenting different gestures,” Chambers explains. “It's the force of the gesture that gives rise to the movement.
“There are runs where I feel like bursting into tears, and runs where I feel like laughing,” she adds of the emotional journey. “It brings out emotions; it brings out things that surprise you. You’re flooded with all the things that have happened. It’s continuing to live the experience of who we are—we’re right there with the sound and there with the rhythms.”
Photo by Gianmarco Bresadola
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