sisyphus - karen jamieson

Ten Choreographic Masterworks of the 20th Century

Article by Chantal Pontbriand for Dance Collection Danse Magazine No.55, Spring 2003

Karen Jamieson’s Sisyphus forms a group of men and women, interconnected with one another in a constant stream. Their bodies move individually and together, forming couples, small groups, rarely remaining isolated. The movement is fluid and gregarious. The bodies exert a seemingly constant pull on one another. The group, as the choreographer herself points out, was initially made up of dancers and non-dancers. When the work was created in 1983, dancers’ bodies were very different from those of today. Dancers were not trained in multiple techniques, which today makes dancers’ bodies into sites charged with a multitude of different techniques and experiences. The resultant work merged these bodies into a veritable flood of movement. The choreography flowed smoothly, welling up from the very energy of the dance, seeking nothing short of the impossible – that is, to capture movement, to crystallize time, to halt time in its tracks. Repetition made its way into the course of time, bodies sped up, slowed down, but the movement itself never ceased. The dancing round was endless.

Karen Jamieson’s dance explores these fundamental truths – the energy and resilience that are necessary for life to go on. The work seems somehow tribal: a pack of humans moving about and running up against existential questions – questions of survival and the impossible transcendence of the matter we are made of, to which our bodies bear endless witness. The tattered cloth costumes draped over their bodies give the dancers a primitive look. The dance was initially done in simple T-shirts and tights. The choreographer insists that Sisyphus reflected a work process, and that the piece’s apparent primitivism at the time was not at the centre of the work: rather, it exposed the dance to work in its most raw, most impulsive dimension, in the way that it reflects the energy of the deployed body. This expresses a desire to go right to the base of things, to explore “naked life,” as philosopher Giorgio Agamben would put it – for life, in its very rawest and unavoidable essence, exudes from this work. It reflects the horrific sentiment of life together, of tribal life, and its impregnability. David McIntyre composed a score for percussion and voice: the percussion is superimposed on the dancers’ vocalizations. The bodies’ blend in with the primitive sound of the percussion, the raw sound of the universe with the guttural and primary sound of the bodies. The individual’s solitary life, beset by the eternal return, within a society and a world which – though necessary and unavoidable – are ultimately foreign to him: such is Karen Jamieson’s Sisyphus.

- C.P.