In conjunction with Beginning with the Seventies: Radial Change, please join us at the Belkin for an afternoon dedicated to thinking together about the intricate relationships among movement, bodies, archives and performance. Practitioners from disparate disciplines yet with shared theoretical and material concerns, Justine Chambers’s in situ performance will activate a simultaneous discussion with Evann Siebens and Peter Dickinson.

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. In her work, she privileges what is felt over what is seen, by working with her body as an imperfect recording device to develop a cumulative embodied archive. Chambers’s interests are in re-imagining dance performance and activating the dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Chambers is a founding member of projet bk, was associate artist at the Dance Centre (2015-17) and artist-in-residence at artist-run centre 221a (2017). Chambers is one of three artists selected for the Yulanda Faris Choreographer’s Program, was the recipient of the Chrystal Dance Prize (2016) and the Lola Award (2018). Her recent works include: ten thousand times and one hundred more, The Choreography Walk, Family Dinner, Family Dinner: The Lexicon, Back Up Front, Enters and Exits and COPY. Chambers has shared her projects at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Artspeak, Festival of New Dance, Mile Zero, Agora de la Danse, Canada Dance Festival, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Western Front, Dancing on the Edge Festival and Dance in Vancouver. Recent collaborations include projects with Laurie Young, Elisa Ferrari, Evann Siebens, Claudia Fancello, Su-Feh Lee, Marilou Lemmens & Richard Ibghy, Jen Weih, Brendan Fernandes and Josh Hite. Chambers is Max-Tyler Hite’s mother.

Peter Dickinson is a Professor at Simon Fraser University, with a joint appointment in the School for the Contemporary Arts and the Department of English. He is Director of SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies. Dickinson has published extensively on theatre, dance, film and performance art, and he is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books and special journal issues. Dickinson’s own plays include The Objecthood of Chairs (SFU Woodward’s, 2010), Positive ID (Berkeley Theatre, Toronto, 2012), Long Division (Pi Theatre, 2016/17) and The Bathers (excerpt, Zee Zee Theatre, 2017). As a writer, researcher, facilitator, outside eye, collaborator and occasional mover, Dickinson has worked with several Vancouver-based dance artists and companies, including Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon, plastic orchid factory, Ziyian Kwan/dumb instrument Dance, Tara Cheyenne Performance, Kokoro Dance, Vanessa Goodman/action at a distance, Lesley Telford/Inverso Dance and Rob Kitsos. Dickinson blogs about Vancouver performance at performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.com.

Evann Siebens makes media with movement. She has exhibited her projects at galleries such as Eyebeam and Centre Pompidou, while her documentaries have been screened at MOMA and on PBS. A former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and Bonn Ballet, Siebens graduated from New York University. Now based in Vancouver, she has participated in residencies at Banff Centre, UNIT/PITT and ACME with Keith Doyle. Siebens recently won the ID/Identities Istanbul Best Video Prize and performed at Western Front, as well as New Media Gallery, Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include MediaArtLab/Urban Screen, Russia, Lincoln Centre Film Society, New York, and screening a commissioned work during FacadeFest on the exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver.

Image (above):Evann Siebens, Plus TheCo, Minus Helen Goodwin, 2018, production still. Courtesy of the artist and Wil Aballe Art Projects. Photo: Evann Siebens

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For further information please contact: Jana Tyner at jana.tyner@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-1389, or fax: (604) 822-6689