The Brutal Joy is a performance that wields the materiality of Black Vernacular line dance and Black sartorial gesture as physical cogitation, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.
The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisational performance for sound, light, and dance performed by Justine A. Chambers, Mauricio Pauly, James Proudfoot. The work is an antiphonal relational collaboration, an activation of The Electric Slide and Black dandyism to invoke the Black imaginary, and activate an embodied counter-archive—a reservoir for gestures, individual affective memories and under documented histories.
Meet the artists on March 27, 2025, after the performance