Solo From Chaos

Premiere
National Arts Centre
Dance In Canada Conference, Ottawa, 1982

1982

About

The original name of this work was Solo from Coming Out of Chaos as the piece was a response or commentary on a long and difficult and chaotic process of creative collaboration that resulted in a group work, Coming Out of Chaos.

This work toured across Canada to the National Arts Centre, to Quebec City, and to Montreal. The dancers were Jennifer Mascall, Peter Bingham, Ahmed Hassan, Lola McLaughlin, Peter Ryan, Barbara Bourget, and Savannah Walling. Coming Out of Chaos was a pivotal work for me and for the group. The group with the exception of Savannah Walling went on to form the original EDAM and I left Terminal City Dance to form a company of my own.

In the work, Solo from Chaos, I was interested in finding a spatial expression for the idea of descent and ascent. I was looking for ways to create a sense of a layered universe that the dancer traveled through on her descent, and a physical language to differentiate the different levels or stages of the descent. The use of the ladder was a practical way to convey the sense that the work was taking place in the vertical dimension. The other was the use of spirals – huge spirals that sucked the dancer down, spirals that shot her back up. The use of breath was central to the work with its inside out and outside in focus.

- Karen Jamieson

More information about the Solo from Chaos 2008 re-creation here.

More information about Solo from Chaos (Duet) 2009 here.

The People

Choreographer/Performer: Karen Jamieson (Rimmer)

Music composed and performed by: Ahmed Hassan

Costume design and realization: Karen Jamieson

Reviews

“But Karen (Jamieson) Rimmer’s solo from Coming Out of Chaos – unrecognizable and far better than the version Terminal City dance Research recently toured – provided the richest performance of the evening, a gut-wrenching solo whose simple score by Ahmed Hassan gave the dance a consistent edge of suspense.”

- Stephen Godfrey
The Globe and Mail, June 28, 1982

“Terminal City Dance Research’s Karen Rimmer performed her own solo from Coming Out of Chaos with all the energy and razor-edged pugnacity one recognizes as Rimmer’s hallmark. It was a remarkable work, remarkably performed, ably strengthened by percussionist Ahmed Hassan.”

- J. Rebecca Robinson
“Friday Review”
Canadian Dance News, August 1982

Karen (Jamieson) Rimmer’s Coming Out of Chaos…“This solo developed from her group dance of the same title, a gripping tour do force. At times (Jamieson) Rimmer is a creature of the void convulsing in terror, other times the floor appears to respond like a partner to her contact falls and rolls. Throughout she is enveloped by the vocal pyrotechnics of Ahmed Hassan.”

- Holly Small

“An evening of consistently interesting and generally tightly crafted dances, one work does stand out. (Jamieson) Rimmer’s own Solo from Coming Out of Chaos is a brilliant piece that seems somehow to create a fusion between movement, breath and internal states of mind.”

- Susan Mertens
The Vancouver Sun

”One of (Jamieson) Rimmer’s best known works, it is also a solo performance extracted from an hour-long piece she originally choreographed last year for a company of seven.

Stark, elemental, raw – Coming Out of Chaos is a perfect consolidation of Rimmer’s driving single-mindedness, her incorrigible belief in the inseparability of mind and body, and her fascination with the part of life which human beings have no control over.

The visceral percussions of Rimmer’s co-worker Ahmed Hassan round out the elemental energy of the piece.

Powerful, honest, refreshingly unpresumptuous, Rimmer’s innovative work is ironically, classical enough to stand the test of time.

One gets the uneasy feeling Karen Rimmer has somehow experienced it all – birth, death, pain, joy, sorrow – and yet is wise enough to leave us searching for our own personal truths and answers.”

- Glenda Bartosh
”Karen Rimmer dance - a feast for the senses”
Whistler Question, March 10, 1983

Please note that populating the Karen Jamieson Dance website with new information and images from the archives is an ongoing process that we are undertaking as fast as we can. Karen Jamieson Dance welcomes any corrections or missing information to the description and acknowledgments listed above. These can be forwarded to admin@kjdance.ca