Co-founded Terminal City Dance Research
Co-founded Terminal City Dance
1975
About
In 1975, Karen Jamieson co-initiated the experimental movement collective, Terminal City Dance Research, with Savannah Walling and Terry Hunter.
"Terminal City Dance is a group of seven performing artists who have been working cooperatively together for the past two years to create a unique dance experience. The group members are: Marion-Lea Dahl, Peggy Florin, Terry Hunter, Menlo MacFarlane, Karen Rimmer, Michael Sawyer, and Savannah Walling.
The choreography is the result of the creation of a particular dance idiom that draws from a number of sources: ballet, modern dance, mime, yoga, theatre and gymnastics. The choreography reflects the cooperative working process of the company. Each member is pursuing his/her unique vision, alternately taking on the roles of director and choreographer and dancer. A crucial aspect of the work is an attempt to synthesize the material into workshop form, in order to share discoveries with interested people.
This season’s performance will consist of movement episodes and transformations linked together to create a one hour-and-a-half long show with show with no breaks. The performers use voice and bodies together, and provide their own rhythmic accompaniment. The show is flexible, adapting to many kinds of performing spaces.
The choreographic emphasis is on communications of ideas, insights and feelings. The content may be described as mythic or allegorical, using stereotypes and archetypes. The work reflects political and social realities in terms of kinetic force, rhythm, motivation and direction. The choreography reflects human relationships; the giving and taking of energy and support, the levels and hierarchies, and the roles and personae. It also addresses itself to the questions that keep recurring in each individual’s life, ‘What am I doing here?’ and ‘What are we doing here?’”
- From Terminal City Dance press release, Spring 1977
Photo source: The Vancouver Sun, Monday April 25, 1977
Excerpt from Terminal City Dance...At Work
1991 Documentary by Michael Goldberg
Distributor - VIVO Media Arts Centre (https://www.vivomediaarts.com)
Reviews
“They call themselves Terminal City Dance, but their newest program no more fits your neatly preconceived categories of dance than their first one did, a year ago. They are involved with dance, theatre, motion, emotion – they are involved with life, and if you go to the repeat of their show tonight, do yourself a favour: leave your assumptions and expectations at home, go open.
It is an exhilarating, sobering, exhausting show that runs a gamut of many moods; it is a dance and it is theatre and it is a blend of both – dance theatre in the broadest sense of the term.
Dance? Yes, of course – dance of violence and theatricality, dance that profits from all manner of influences and styles and refuses to attach itself to any.
There was no printed program for Sunday’s performance at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre; the natural flow and rhythm of the performance made its own points, often surprisingly literal statements or pleas about everyone’s questions and worries about the human condition.
Often, the group comes up with some pure-movement imagery that capsulizes in a moment some aspect of human reality that would takes minutes in words – and isn’t that what is ultimately at the heart of all dance, all theatre?”
- Max Wyman
“Dance comes to life”
The Vancouver Sun, May 16, 1977
“It’s a struggle to leave the Terminal City Dance performance with an all-encompassing statement about what the show is like or about.
The Vancouver-based dance company just doesn’t make it that easy for anyone. But rather than being frustrated, I found myself unruffled by having to struggle trying to understand some dances and still turning up a question mark. The reason was that the dancers, perfectly complementary, are delightful to watch. The abstract moments of pure fluid body movements become to the eye what a romantic foreign language is to the ear – wonderfully pleasant even if there is no understanding.
Moreover these meaningless moments (to me at least) emerge as pleasant and needed interruptions to the astute, and sometimes distressing observations about power, human relationships, movement, dance and art translated into body language.
None of the available adjectives fit Terminal City perfectly. They’re fresh.”
- Carolyn Heiman
“Terminal City dancers are neither mediocre nor boring”
Edmonton Journal, April 18, 1980
“The three performing artists who make up the Terminal City Dance collective are acknowledged as front-runners on the Canadian modern dance scene. One of them, Karen Rimmer, recently won the country’s top dance prize – the Chalmers award for choreography.
Last year, none of them earned more than $5,000. Between the three of them they earn in a year less than a single average Canadian. Not that they complain; they get along, they say. It’s better than it used to be. The government grants are beginning to come. This past year, for the first time, they’ve been able to afford a manager, which means they can now concentrate wholly on their work. Previously, they were managers as well as artists. It was like trying to take a shower and towel themselves dry at the same time.
Their manager calls their financial position criminal. The dancers are more philosophical. They recognize the trade-off. More money would change the group’s character. It would reduce their opportunities to experiment; it would diminish their freedom, because it would impose expectations. They don’t deny that they should have to pay for the privilege and satisfaction of doing dance their way.
Terminal City wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice of name for a dance company; it conjures vivid images of the near-to-croaking. The facts confound the image; they are one of the most consistently lively dance producers in the country.
It’s an unusual company in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s a collective, with no single artistic director. Individuals being individuals, collectivism can be an uncomfortable way for an arts company to work; but these people find encouragement in the breadth of perspective the system permits.
It’s unusual too, in its constant preparedness to dare the unknown. Some dance companies reach a point of success then coast on what works. The Terminal City people just go on exploring. In the past five years they have consistently explored separate facets of performance – movement, music, mime, ritual. Sometimes what has resulted has seemed amateurish and unsound. At other times, the discoveries have startled and delighted the company’s audiences… and perhaps the company itself.
Exploration headquarters is a long room on the second floor at 531 Carrall, right at the edge of Chinatown. They rehearse with the serious intensity that characterizes their public performance. Over lunch around the communal kitchen table – wonton soup, steamed pork buns, tea – they talk about their work and aims with the same seriousness, the same commitment.
And it is a commitment. It’s one thing for a gang of youngsters fresh from drama or dance school to set themselves up as performers and starve for a year or two. It’s quite another for a group like this to keep at it, giving their lives, year after year, for little or no money and precious little regard – just the satisfaction of the work. Folly? Maybe, maybe.
What are they after? The words don’t come easily. These are dancers, used to dancing their ideas; if they were good at words, they’d be writers. But a thrust emerges. Savannah Walling calls it a search for ‘that central something’ beyond merely existing. She works towards it intuitively; often she discovers years later the significance of decisions she has made in the past. Terry Hunter calls it ‘The Thing’ at the centre of things. The work he does with Terminal City gives him glimpses of it – ‘but as soon as I put my hands out to touch it, it goes and I’m back in confusion again.’
That sort of talk invites derision from some quarters. It’s easy enough to be smart about serious people on serious searches – especially when they’re not costing us very much. But eight days from now they open two weekends of performances at the Western Front Lodge – a program of new dance works built from music explorations with a variety of composers. And as of this week, they have no idea what form the show is going to take.
That’s a frightening situation to be in. Hunter admits to ‘a terrible desire to crawl into bed and stay there.’ Rimmer says it feels like hurtling down a crevasse. They all acknowledge a temptation to cover themselves a bit, to do something safe.
They won’t, of course. Whatever they do – brilliant or puerile, inspiring or embarrassing – it won’t be safe. It will be dance at the frontier; artistic exploration on the cheap.”
- Max Wyman
The Province, October 9, 1980
“The ensemble consists of Terry Hunter, Karen Rimmer and Savannah Walling and their friends. As artists they complement each other, their personalities and styles being essentially quite different.
Of the three Terry Hunter is the most extrovert, playing with his audiences and his ideas like a prestidigitator on a high. Karen Rimmer is more obviously movement-oriented and her pieces tend to have a sense of order that is often more fascinating than satisfying. Savannah Walling’s offerings have a depth of feeling that at times borders on the uncanny. Her insights into human frailty and self-inflicted pain bring stabs of recognition that at times make breathing difficult.
All three are marvellously articulate and the two women are both university graduates with a wide cultural background. Their choreographic statements on the contemporary art scene in Canada are perceptive and witty.
Their awareness of theatre history is as broad as their awareness of that of dance. The company is clearly conscious of the need to keep an audience entertained through a variety of means and it accomplishes that at least in every number.
This is the sort of company that should be invited to appear in a larger, more traditional setting. There is enough substance in what it has to offer to warrant that kind of attention and respect.”
- Jacob Siskind
“Vancouver troupe witty, moving”
The Ottawa Citizen, March 9, 1981
“Terminal City is taking movement, theatre and music exploration in new directions. It does this by incorporating shock and brutality (both physically and in sound), by juxtaposing moments of beauty and calm as well as high humour and mime and by using light and darkness to underline its dynamics.
Throughout all this it weaves a solid carpet of rhythm and ritual. Bravo.”
- Linde Howe-Beck
“Dance group full of horror”
The Gazette, March 14, 1981
“Perhaps the most fascinating thing about these dancers is the way in which they seem to be constantly engaged in one form of rhythmic ritual or another; or in a kind of self-generated tribal rite in which vocalizing, the counterpoint of the spoken word, and sculptural mime are deliberately designed to assume a dramatic importance equal to that of their dancing.”
- Wayne Edmonstone
“Terminal City adds life”
The Vancouver Sun, May 20, 1981
Brochure for Terminal City Dance Research Centre:
Banner photo credit: Savannah Walling Archives