Meeting with Michael Chambers at the BAND gallery, I noted that he is still excited about Motion, long after the year of wrangling, reworking and searching in which he found old posters in basements, buried under other ephemera on corkboards and often in terrible shape. And an excited Chambers is one part scholar, two parts social hurricane.
Arts organizations, of all types, are notoriously terrible at keeping archives. Where did you find all these posters, some of them dating back to the late 1970s?
Ha! It took a loooong time! I went everywhere, from the Metro Archives to friends' houses to my own papers. The difficult part was that many of the posters were damaged, or were just tiny leaflets, so I had a technical assistant who helped me scan the posters, clean them up, or expand them, and that was enormously time-consuming. Some of these posters were 30 years old, and you can't just scan them with regular scanners, you have to use special equipment or they will fall apart.
You have a long relationship with dancers as models for your own work, so the terrain was familiar.
Yes, and no, and no because every dancer is different. I photograph dancers because they are comfortable with their bodies. They also are storytellers – their job is to tell the story created by the choreographer – so when I photograph dancers, I always see it as a co-operation. They bring something; I bring something. I ask them to trust me, and we discover a set of images together.
Are any of these dance posters your own works?
No, but I photographed dancers for the Then & Now poster imagery, and I specifically wanted dancers I had worked with before, whose bodies, the muscles in their bodies, told stories, carried a lot of experience.
There is such a range in this collection. Did you feel any pressure to represent everybody in the dance community, or, more specifically, the black dance community?
I wanted excitement, and I wanted history too – but because every dance company has a different mandate, there could never be a common thread. You need to jump from image to image, to float around, and then make your own connections. There's no single image or style or type of dance or dance image that wholly reflects the black dance experience.
This show is about the culture of black dance, which includes non-black dancers too. In Canada, the landscape of cultural appreciation is merging – black companies do classical ballet, for instance. Everyone's speaking with their own voice, and this show celebrates the years and years of black influence in dance that has graced the Canadian stage.
This interview has been condensed and edited.