Event, Talk | Dance Dialogue
Justine A. Chambers and Ryan Tacata: Patterning
Patterning
Join us for Dance Dialogues – a three-part series of talks where artists and scholars delve into the ideas, practices, and provocations that shape contemporary dance and art-making. Engage with thought-provoking perspectives in an open space for critical inquiry and nuanced reflection.
Justine A. Chambers and Ryan Tacata (friends, academic colleagues, and art collaborators) speak to, with, and through their overlapping creative practices. Framed by gestures and forms produced by garments and garment-making techniques, they weave their way through a conversation, stitching together musings on artistic practice and everyday life.
2025-2026 season
October 15 #1 Justine A. Chambers and Ryan Tacata: Patterning
December 3 #2 Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn: Field-Work: a slow dance
April 8 #3 Tasha Faye Evans: Choreography and Coast Salish Art and Design
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. Her research attends to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals and theatres nationally and internationally including: EMPAC, PICA, Toronto Biennial of Art, Agora de la Danse, Libby Leshgold Gallery, CAG, Sophiensaele, Artspeak, The Western Front, The Dance Centre, National Arts Centre, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Art Museum at U of T, Mile Zero Dance, and the Hong Kong Performing Arts Festival. She is an Assistant Professor at the School for Contemporary Arts at SFU, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Dr. Ryan Tacata is a performance maker, educator, and scholar living in Vancouver, BC. He has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) and received his PhD in Performance Studies from Stanford University. His creative practice is deeply collaborative and engages in place making, ordinary acts, and gift-giving. His academic research plays critical intimacy in the key of everyday life, and focuses on alternative methods of archival research and performance art historiography. As an educator, his workshops and classes cover a range of topics, including histories and theories of conceptual art, practice-based research in performance, social practice, body art, automobiles in the avant-garde, and the sporting event. As a Visiting Faculty member, he taught in the department of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute and in the MFA Theater and Performance Making Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (SF) and University of Chichester (UK). In 2018, he was a Visiting Lecturer for the Abandoned Practices Institute (Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, and Mark Jeffery) with Erin Manning, and was Lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program at Stanford University from 2018-2020. He is currently Assistant Professor of Performance at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University.
Photos: Rachel Topham, courtesy of the artist