Choreographic Works

Trickster, 2015

A seasoned choreographer who believes in the profundity of human movement is being taunted. A relentless bouffon is dismantling her serious practice with gleeful mockery. Paradox and Play– Mockery shocks, it’s a collision of perception that brings the discussion down to its essence, resulting in a kind of freedom.

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Collision, 2011

Everything is in collision – 96 percent of our universe is unknowable. This unknowable 96 percent is called dark matter, dark as in unknown. Except through its gravitational pull – Its collisions – Its hits and near misses. Thousands of years before First Contact, the area of the Roundhouse and Yaletown in Vancouver was the territory and ancestral home of the Coast Salish people, specifically the Squamish Nation.

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Stand Your Ground, 2007

One of the revelations of past engagement with the Downtown Eastside community is that art might be the most potent tools for survival that human beings have come up with to date and dance might possibly be the most powerful of these tools.

Stand Your Ground was the result of the Dance in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside program and the seed for the creation of the Carnegie Dance Troupe.

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The River, 1998

The River traces the memory of Brewery Creek (Vancouver) through the landscape it once flowed freely for centuries. It's shape is still visible in the streets and alleyways of our city, defining our neighbourhoods .

With the S'pak'wus Slu'lum Dancers of the Squamish Nation, the Brewery Creek Historical Society and other community groups, KJD created a processional performance to honour the layers of history and memory of the now buried waterway.

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Mudwoman, 1990

The idea for Mudwoman (1990) emerged while walking in the mudflats of a bay on the coast of British Columbia. I had an impulse to cover my body with the clay of the mudflats. As it dried in the sun, it dried all cracked and full of wrinkles to become like an ancient body. I felt a thousand years old.

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Sisyphus, 1983

I had undertaken to try to build a dance company, something I experienced as pitting myself against impossible odds. I was interested in the idea of dance itself as hard labour and the dancers forming the working class of the arts.

Sisyphus created in 1983, Karen Jamieson Dance founded in 1983.

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Terminal City Dance Research, 1975

Karen was one of the founding members of the experimental dance collective, Terminal City Dance Research, which became one of the front runners of the Canadian contemporary dance landscape. With co-founders, Savannah Walling and Terry Hunter, they studied dance, voice and the physical theatre techniques of Jerzy Growtowski laying the groundwork for development of a new language of interdisciplinary experimental dance.

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