Bricolage
Bricolage
1984
The People
Created and Performed by: Salvador Ferreras and Karen Jamieson (Rimmer)
Additional Percussion and Synthesizer: Robert Caldwell
Technical Director: Barry Donlevy
Lighting Design: Edward Arteaga
Production Assistants: Barbara Clausen and Joyce Ozier
Poster and Program Design: Elizabeth Fischer
Special thanks to: Theodore Wan, Sharon Norman, Barbara Clausen, Joyce Ozier, and Drums Only.
Reviews
“We were fortunate this weekend to witness at the Firehall Theatre a joint creative project of choreographer and dancer Karen Jamieson Rimmer and composer/musician Salvador Ferreras. The result of this collaboration was a dynamic evening of dance and music.
Ferreras opened the program with a short solo played on xylophone. It was a serene composition with a subtle sense of underlying tension. After a brief pause, the lights come up and Ferreras is slowly beating a large drum lit with red light. Rimmer is off to one side, against the back wall as though chained to it. Several times she comes away from the wall, pulled by the beat of the drums and performs a ritualistic sort of dance that is defiant and challenging but each time she returns to take her position against the wall.
Eventually she breaks away completely as Ferreras moves back to the xylophone. Her dance becomes liberated.
Ferreras moves to a table filled with noisemakers and one by one picks them up to create different sounds. Rimmer becomes involved, selecting items for Ferreras to play. There is a sense of discovery as Rimmer explores new sounds and rhythms. In the end, the lights go down and Rimmer returns to the wall, captive of the overpowering drum.
The program was a fascinating interplay of music and dance. Neither was there to serve the exigencies of the other but mesh into an intricate web which transcended both.”
- CHQM AM/FM
“Q’s Reviews”
June 9, 1984
“Music and dance stripped to bare essentials – one percussionist and one dancer. And for leavening, some lighthearted nonsense thrown into the performance.
Salvador Ferreras and Karen Jamieson Rimmer were at the Firehall Theatre on the weekend.
Ferreras, silent and still, stood contemplatively behind the marimba before unleashing his disciplined power on Torse III (1968) by Akira Miyoshi.
I am frustrated in trying to convey to you in printed words the wonderful sounds that come leaping or oozing from instruments: sounds like iridescent bubbles streaming from a child’s soap bubble pipe, rainbowed in the sunlight momentarily, then gone into memory.
Ferreras evoked childhood memories of bashing away on a xylophone. The sounds the child hears, though, are the rich, reverberatory tones Ferreras gave us, not the clash our parents have heard.
Bricolage was created and performed by Ferreras and Rimmer.
This opened in a graphically dramatic manner with dancer Rimmer held prisoner against a grey wall by harsh shadow bars slashed across her entire body. The opening portion of the dance was aggressive, martial.
The inventiveness of Ferreras’ playing did frequently steal the limelight from the dancer.”
- Agnes Stevens
“For Youthful Voices”
The Vancouver Courier, June 13, 1984