Mudwoman
Mudwoman
Premiere Performance at the Vancouver Playhouse 1990
1990
About
The idea for Mudwoman 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 I was transforming from young to old, I felt the ever shifting relationship between the earthly body of flesh and the energy body of spirit. I felt a thousand years old.
Over the course of the performance, under the intense heat of the stage lights, a layer of wet clay over my body dries to dust on my skin. This brings into relief a myriad of lines and fissures, invisible to the eye when the clay was wet, now as clearly delineated as a dry riverbed in drought.
This process resonates as metaphor for the relentless transformation of our bodies through time. Mudwoman is a meditation on the body as a temporal garment, subject to time and the transformation processes of aging.
The People
Original music composition: Jeff Corness
Choreography and Performance: Karen Jamieson
Costumes: Susan Berganzi
Sampled Voices: Pam Howard-Jones and Tamsin Kelsey
Reviews
“Jamieson is a visionary choreographer, respected for the evolution of her dance language – one that synthesizes primal archetypal images with the animating principles of the early modernists, one that is driven by an uncompromising, rhythmic physicality. Jamieson describes her creative process this way: ‘I’ll start with an image or movement quality. The idea is the question. I don’t know where it will take me…But the resulting piece is always a surprise - it is a response, the answer.’
A couple of years ago, Jamieson confronted one of these idea-questions at her cabin retreat. She covered herself with mud and sat in the sun. ‘By the time the mud dried. I felt a thousand years old, ancient,’ she says, ‘I was dealing with the notion of transformation – from young to old’
This character, the ‘Mud Woman’ appeared in a work titled Rainforest. But Jamieson wanted to develop her persona more fully. So the ‘Mud Woman’ has become the focus for a new solo work to premiere February 2 and 3 at the Vancouver Playhouse along with two other pieces, The Man Within and a work-in-progress that is yet to be titled.”
- Heather Doran Barbieri
“Grand Eloquence”
Pacific Northwest Magazine, February 1990
“In her solo, Mudwoman, Jamieson turns once more to shamanism, creating an intermediary who fends off a brooding, shadowy world. She rocks back and forth on her heels, her back tightly arched, invoking spirits that wheel overhead. Her fingers scrabble at her throat.
Daubed in clay, Jamieson appear anointed for some primeval ritual, moving as if her body were suspended by the shoulder blades. As her motions become more insistent, the clay is pulverized, flying off in clouds of dust. Her shimmying legs and stamping feet suggest a war dance.”
- Michael Scott
“Dance and elemental language”
The Vancouver Sun, February 5, 1990
“…and Karen Jamieson’s Mudwoman, a clay-caked solo created in 1987 and reprised several times since, a study of ecstatic possession and transformation.”
- Deborah Meyers
“Festival takes the right steps”
The Vancouver Sun, July 7, 2001
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