Keywords Born in 1946 Dancers & Choreographers

The company has appeared across Canada and in the US and Europe, and in 1990 Jamieson was invited to create a site-specific work for the public spaces of the National Gallery of Canada, concurrently with a retrospective exhibition of works by West coast artist Emily Carr. In the early 1990s much of her creativity centred on collaborative performance by native and non-native artists, based on a Gitksan concept of law whereby two groups of opposing views come together to resolve conflict. In 1991 she presented Gawa gyani, a site-specific performance collaboration with native artists, at the University of BC Museum of Anthropology, and in subsequent seasons continued to refine that work in performance in Canada and internationally.

In 1997 Jamieson toured northwestern BC with Stone Soup, a show based on an ancient European legend about an itinerant trickster, and featuring indigenous performers from each of the territories in which the piece was performed. Throughout the 1990s Jamieson experimented with a variety of non-theatrical locations for her dances. In 1998 she presented The River, featuring 110 dancers and volunteers in a "processional performance to honour the layers of history and memory" of a now-buried Vancouver waterway, in daily stages at different locations in the city. In 1999 she presented The Garden, which explored the concept of the garden of life using Biblical text, at Vancouver's Christ Church Cathedral. 1998 and 1999 also saw presentations at the Vancouver Art Gallery of another experiment in cross-cultural creativity, Necessary Encounter, in which she used the myth of the journey into the labyrinth to bring about a meeting between two traditions, modern dance and contemporary Northwest Coast mask making.

Jamieson, Karen
Karen Jamieson Dance Company (photo by David Cooper).

Author MAX WYMAN