April 11/20: Justine A. Chambers
Photo: iiii Photography
Class Description:
*Masks are required for Justine’s classes*
In this class participants work with both scored improvisational tasks and set movement sequences privileging both the individual and the collective movements of the room. The improvisatory scores propose systems of support from inside and outside of the body, invite the articulation of both joints and flesh, and activate the mind as a catalyst for shifts in sensation and perception. The scores incrementally layer movement strategies while attending to how bodies are made and shaped through practice and culture. This class privileges how our way of thinking about our bodies creates a felt sense in the body that is malleable in thought and in practice.
The class progresses with set exercises that incrementally move from the horizontal (floor work) to the vertical plane (standing work) and encourage another application of the opening score’s propositions. With an openness to the possibility of functional change, the structured material invites students to explore the precise moments when their bodies are activated into movement.
Throughout the classes, guided improvisation and set movement become containers for attention. They are strategies for remaining present, feeling the senses work in concert, becoming attuned to the perpetual and dynamic negotiations within our body while being in relationship with the physical spaces we practice in and the people we practice with.
Justine A. Chambers is a choreographer, dancer and educator living and working on the traditional and ancestral Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.