1986 - Riverside Dance Festival

Jack Anderson, The New York Times:

“The multimedia productions of Linda Mussmann often seem to occur in theatrical worlds all their own. Yet they are not totally sealed off from reality.

Omaha to Ogden was a meditation on the vastness of America. Although unconventional, it would not have been inexplicable to anyone who has ever traveled from coast to coast.

A woman sat at one side of the stage, as if pondering such a trip. There were films of foliage and turning windmills. Five women kept crossing the stage in various patterns of rhythmic movements, accompanying their activities with singing and chanting. Occasionally, they stretched their arms, pointing toward something forever in the distance and, in one sequence, they carried pails and appeared to be doing chores.

Semih Firincioğlu’s score, played live by a chamber ensemble, often rustled like the foliage in the films. At other times, it swelled with what sounded like bits of old tunes one thought one recognized yet never could quite identify.”

Karen Campbell, Attitude:

“In Linda Mussmann’s recent Omaha to Ogden (Southwesterly), Mussmann fuses music, dance, text, film and theater into a work of rich ambiguity. Mussmann relishes the enigmatic.

The text for Omaha to Ogden contains lots of lists, litanies of presidents, cities, months, hours, all somehow referring to the passage of time. These lists periodically disrupt a kind of wandering travelogue. A girl in a porch chair functions as a kind of narrator, describing the route from Omaha to Ogden in a stilted monotone.”