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.
On tour music has been performed by Vic
Cheong. 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”.
On a conceptual level of lighting this
performance, I am playing on the ideas of
neutralizing, empowering and overpowering,
making the skin tone of the performers more
or less apparent at different times, making
white as a reference less and less readable.
I go along with rhythm at times and not at
others, guiding the audience perception to
question togetherness, question the obvious,
subliminally touch upon different imprints of
perception relating to color, and touch upon
racial profiling in a less conscious process.
Justine A. Chambers was featured artist with both the performative and video installation version of this work at the Toronto Biennial of Arts in 2024
https://torontobiennial.org/exhibition/one-hundred-more
CREDITS
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young
Composition, Sound design: Neda Sanai, later Vic Cheong
Costume Design, Rehearsal Direction & Dramaturgy: Sarah Doucet
Lighting design: Emese Csornai
Artistic Support : Josh Hite
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
Photography by Josh Hite, 2019, Berlin and still from video documentation Toronto Biennial of Arts 2024