Necessary Encounter
Necessary Encounter
1998
About
“The Vancouver Art Gallery commissioned this work [Necessary Encounter], which fused the ancient tradition of West Coast mask making with the tradition of European modern dance. Necessary Encounter was shown in conjunction with an exhibition of West Coast mask making with the tradition of European modern dance. Necessary Encounter was shown in conjunction with an exhibition of West Coast masks called Down from the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast.
Developed in the rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery, under the eyes of the passing public. Necessary Encounter is a dialogue between cultures.
The work is a duet for a masked and an unmasked figure, an exploration of the intersection of the physical and the spirit realm. The work is also a metaphor for cultural encounter.”
- From Necessary Encounter Vancouver Art Gallery handbill, 1998
THE PEOPLE
Choreographer: Karen Jamieson
Composer: Jeff Corness
Performers: Karen Jamieson and Laura Crema
Rehearsal Director: Kathleen Weiss
Carver of “Feelings and Emotions” Mask: Sanford Williams (Mowachaht, member nation of the Nuu-chah-nulth of Yuquot on Nootka Island)
Text: Chief Kenneth B. Harris (Gitxsan, Gisgahaast (Fireweed) Clan of Damelahamid and Hereditary Chief (Simoiget) of the House Hagbegwatku)
REVIEWS
Necessary Encounter is “a short, powerful and inventive piece that is offered up as a myth, but feels like a recounting of the choreographer’s own creative journey.”
“We first see the woman through an archway in the rotunda, rising and falling frantically as she struggles against the pull of gravity, or at least the pull of the down escalator from the gallery’s third floor. She gradually makes her way down to the ground floor, all the while being whipsawed around by the throbbing and propulsive rhythms of Corness’s score. She ends up cowering in a corner, singing a wordless lament in a voice filled with fear and longing.
The masked spirit, who has observed her struggle from a perch in one of the porticoes that line the wall of the rotunda, hears her cries and descends, moving deliberately along the ledge and down the stairs. The spirit’s gestures are simple and powerful, full of clenched fists and aggressive stances. But Sanford Williams’ mask, titled Feelings and Emotions, softens the martial movement, presenting an almost tender face to the woman, who gradually adopts the gestures as her own, and finally ascends the stairs and the escalator with the masked spirit.
The transformation is moving and hopeful, and in many respects echoes Jamieson’s own evolution as a choreographer….Necessary Encounter may not be as expansive and elaborate as 1997’s Stone Soup or 1991’s Gawa Gyani, but it offers the same enlightened message.”
- Chris Dafoe
“Inventive journey draws on native myths”
The Globe and Mail, July 8, 1999
“Necessary Encounter is a brush between two figures – one an urban white woman, the other a masked from native myth. A parallel encounter occurs in the score by Jeff Corness, which uses texts in Gitksan by Ken Harris.
Jamieson has been intensely exploring the confluence of native and non-native culture for the last decade. The encounter she describes in this brilliant, deeply carved piece is as much between opposing beliefs as between two dancing bodies.
Curved walls never seem curvier than when dancers in Jamieson’s site-specific works are curling along them; straight walls never straighter. She has a way of delineating plaster-and-brick spaces that reawaken them in our mind’s eye. When the native creature retreats, crouching, to a little hidey-hole beneath the rotunda’s curving staircase, one knows that she will be there ever after, in our memories.
And so the work, performed at noon Monday, recapitulates Jamieson’s conviction that the native myths which grew in this countryside for thousands of years retain their power over human hearts, and are still at work on us, whether or not we credit their existence.”
- Michael Scott
“Jamieson’s Encounter creates urban myth”
The Vancouver Sun, July 1999
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