Moving Together, 22 Ways

In Moving Together, 22 Ways, Justine A. Chambers and Alana Gerecke offer twenty-two choreographies of the everyday, each an invitation for other bodies to take up and explore. These choreographies approach assemblies in motion, itinerant assemblies that spread and gather before they have time to settle. The assemblies these scores propose are speculative choreographies worked through the flesh. They register relationships to the built environment and to the bodies that populate those environments as fleeting and kinaesthetic, embodied knowledge on the move. Drawing from their respective practices and fixations, Chambers and Gerecke take up the choreographic invitations built into the architecture of specific places: Canadian sidewalks, transit platforms, intersections, elevators, and public squares. They insist: if objects choreograph us, and if the city functions as an architecture of assembly, then it is worth thinking seriously—and kinaesthetically—about how the objects that constitute our public spaces move us and shape our interactions. The scores engage with unspoken movement expectations that structure these places by offering subtle shifts to the formal arrangements of assembly each site invites. In other words, these twenty-two scores reframe and rework the dances that are already there, the social choreographies found all around.