Beautiful Renegades (2022)

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This week is the final installment of the Creation Catalogue blog. We have reached the most recently produced and final piece in the company’s repertoire, Beautiful Renegades. Peggy writes:

The company’s final main stage production, Beautiful Renegades, had been in the works since 2016. Inspired by the artist-run space 15 Dance Lab – the locus of avant-garde dance in 1970’s Toronto – this production was built around choreographic works by Elizabeth Chitty, Margaret Dragu, Lily Eng, Louise Garfield, Johanna Householder, and Jennifer Mascall.

The seventies birthed the notion of the body politic – groups of citizens rising up together in an urgent and forceful struggle for massive, fundamental societal change. Among the burning issues of that time: gay rights, feminism, reproductive rights, and gender equity; the post-civil rights movement, forged through the turmoil and grief in the wake of the assassination Martin Luther King Jr.; the outrage of Indigenous Peoples aroused by the Canadian government’s White Paper proposing the termination of their ‘special legal status’; the atrocities of the war in Viet Nam, the protests and civil disobedience that erupted in reaction, and the disability activism that arose in its aftermath; the burgeoning environmental and anti-nuclear movements.

Within that charged societal framework, young dance artists in Toronto worked to disrupt the status quo – questioning the relevance of established companies and the inherent privileging of particular forms of training, methods of creating, and styles of performing. Young artists banded together to work as collectives experimenting with new premises for training and creation. They eliminated the need to vie for opportunities in a mainstream they did not want to join by establishing artist-run-centres to make space for their generation to create, collaborate, perform, and discuss the new directions in the form and content of their work. The resonance of the 1970’s with the 2020’s is deep and striking.

With the foundational work of bringing together the choreographic scenes mostly complete, I turned to playwright Michael Ross Albert to commission a script that he titled Beautiful Renegades. The lynch pin choice for director was Eda Holmes, a former ballet dancer whose career culminated with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, and whose second career has taken her to the upper echelons of Canadian theatre. She assembled an incredible design team including Gillian Gallow (sets and costumes), Debashis Sinha (sound) and Jeff Pybus (lighting and projections) as well as bringing in performers Erika Prevost and Shauna Thompson to join the cast members already in place – Sarah Fregeau, David Norsworthy and Jarrett Siddall and long-time colleague of Michael Ross Albert, Anne van Leeuwen.

As strange as it might have seemed to conclude the history of my dance company with a play rather than a dance concert, it also provided an unexpected sense of closure to my long life in dance. In fact, I came to the dance world as a theatre school drop-out, having left the exceptional program at the University of Alberta where I had been studying acting with the legendary Tom Peacocke, and where the course led by stage designer Gwen Keatley – Theatre Design Aesthetics – provided me with foundational tools for bringing work into a performance space that supported me for my entire career.

My youthful ambitions to become an actor ultimately delivered me to my life in dance. The poetry of closing my company with a play located in the time and place I discovered when I entered the milieu, while unintentional, feels absolutely right, and the perfect bookend. PB

Read about more dancer-led collectives in Toronto - Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise.

peggybakerdance.com is now in the process of transforming from an active site to the Peggy Baker Dance Projects archive of more than 30 years of dance creation, production, touring and educational programming. We invite to you visit regularly as we build the new site piece by piece, artist by artist, due for completion by June 2023.

All photos by Dahlia Katz.

Choreographic Gems (2022)

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The focus of this week’s post - a series of 9 exquisite films by William Yong - is available to view here on our website until the end of January 2023. Peggy writes:

In 2016, I was invited to submit a proposal to Soulpepper – one of Toronto’s most ambitious and successful venued theatre companies – for a new play to be commissioned by them and produced by my company. I pitched a production inspired by the avant-garde dance world of 1970s Toronto, and to my great astonishment and excitement, my submission was chosen as one of 30+ productions for a massive and generously endowed program under the banner Project ImagiNation.

Research for the project centered on 15 Dance Lab – an artist-run performance space operated by Lawrence and Miriam Adams in Toronto from 1974 to 1980 – and on the work of dance artists creating and presenting there and elsewhere in the city, including A Space and The Music Gallery. All these years later, I still have vivid memories of extraordinary, ground-breaking works by iconoclastic creator/performers presented in these spaces.

Work on the play began with an excavation of the archives of 15 Dance Lab – then mostly uncatalogued – undertaken by archivist Victoria Mohr-Blackeney. I sought out choreographers from the era to investigate the possibility of resurrecting key works as historical miniatures – abbreviated versions of longer dances that captured the creator’s signature.

Working with dancers Sarah Fregeau, Benjamin Kamino and David Norsworthy, distillations of pioneering works by Johanna Householder, Elizabeth Chitty and Lily Eng were developed in a first round of rehearsals. In later rehearsal blocks, Jennifer Mascall worked on recapturing the essence of an early trio with Sarah, David and Jarrett Siddall, while actor Shauna Thompson worked on an iconic solo with Louise Garfield.

Ultimately, the pandemic and a change in artistic leadership meant that Soulpepper let go of the project with me, but by then I was absolutely committed to the whole enterprise, and my company succeeded in realizing both a series of films, Choreographic Gems, and a commissioned play, Beautiful Renegades, written by Michael Ross Albert and directed by Eda Holmes.

Choreographic Gems is made up of nine short films by William Yong focused on early works by Elizabeth Chitty, Lily Eng, Louise Garfield, Johanna Householder, and Jennifer Mascall. Each film is a miniature that captures the choreographer’s signature within the distillation of a dance that is central to their body of work. The exceptional dance artists whose performances are captured in the films are Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau, Erika Provost, Jarrett Siddall, Shauna Thompson and Anne van Leeuwen.

Lessness (1974) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau, Jarrett Siddall

In this early work, Jennifer Mascall interrogates and disrupts systems for building meaning by breaking apart and then reordering movement phrases through the intersession of chance procedures, and then misaligning the resulting choreography with images elicited through text – originally by Samuel Beckett, but in this reimaging by Michael Ross Albert – spoken in unison by the dancers. This is a dance that positions itself as holding more – detail, elaboration, complexity, multiple simultaneous tasks – yet meaning less.

WKEY / boxes (1975) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau

Johanna Householder works with concise organizing principles, and in thinking back to this brief episode from WKEY, she shared descriptions of remembered action to call up the premise for the choreography. In the original version, two dancers rolled and tumbled back and forth, their progress interrupted as they hit up against large crates on either side of the performance space. The film version of the choreography takes place within a sunken space, like an open box, and the dancers never quite reach the sides.

WKEY / poles (1975) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau

This second excerpt from WKEY was reconstructed by accessing a series of photographs archiving the original performance. Johanna Householder describes this scene as “a sculptural proposition as much as a dance”. The bamboo poles – contributed by her performance partner, visual artist Jon Miller – are in no way decorative objects. Householder described herself as working within an “object-oriented ontology”; the poles present a sculpture that is activated by the dancers. And like the intentionally distorted sound elicited when a musician plays a prepared piano, the unexpected ways in which the poles interfere with the dancers’ movement objectives is primary to the realization of the choreography.

Hitting it Sideways (1975) Kevin Lau

Internationally recognized for her iconoclastic work, Lily Eng built her reputation on dance performances of astonishing, even harrowing, physicality. Her dances are conceived with preconditions to be met extemporaneously, by harnessing her “confident mind” as a powerhouse improvisor manifesting “vitality through spontaneity“. Dancing alone, she nonetheless identified the surfaces in a performance space – the floor, the walls, the corners, a staircase, a door, a ledge, a crate, a table – as her performance partners.

Withheld (1975) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau, Erika Provost, Jarrett Siddall, Shauna Thompson, Anne van Leeuwen

The dancing captured in this film was inspired by a 25-minute solo – a tour de force of endurance and kinetic imagination – devised and performed by Lily Eng. Withheld vividly demonstrates Eng’s foundational commitment to authenticity centered in her racial and cultural identity and in the specificity of her practice as a martial artist. She describes accomplishing this dance by “channeling energy from the earth” and managing that energy at a vibrational level until it was beyond her capacity to contain.

Mover (1975) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau, Jarrett Siddall

This distillation of Elizabeth Chitty’s large-scale Mover demonstrates some of her most deeply held creative commitments: circumventing theatrical structure, avoiding images that imply a need for interpretation, exposing effort, and dealing directly with weight and gravity. The performers alternate between actively moving another dancer’s passive but alert body and having their own passive but alert body moved. This formal conceptual premise proposes choreography that arises as an outcome of task-oriented interaction.

Lap / sleeve (1976) Sarah Fregeau, Jarrett Siddall

In this searing duet by Elizabeth Chitty, violent physical contact between a woman and man is structured by the intervention of a primary object – a single sleeve that they share. Working rigorously against theatricality and mimicry, Chitty is uncompromising in her efforts to achieve what she describes as “corporeal honesty”. The dancers lean into her hard-core movement with force and weight.

Lap / whistles (1976) Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau

In this second excerpt from the full-length work Lap, Elizabeth Chitty again introduces an object that has huge implications choreographically. In this case, a woman and a man each hold a whistle between their teeth while insinuating their weight into, onto, and against one another. The menacing sound of their breathing, amplified by the whistles, and the painfully slow pace of the action builds a scene laden with tension. As Chitty put it, “there’s trouble here”.

Balloon 2 (1977) Shauna Thompson

Throughout the mid 1970s Louise Garfield created a whole series of gorgeous, funny, and poetic works with balloons of all sizes – party balloons, massive transparent bubbles that one could climb inside, weather balloons… These balloons proved themselves to be entities capable of extraordinary acts of image-making. While Garfield always kept herself single mindedly committed to the specific set of tasks that made up her choreography, the floating, deflating, bouncing, vibrating, rolling, bursting balloons never failed to offer potent images that emerged seeming of their own volition.

Watch all nine of the Choreographic Gem films here on our website.

Watch Miriam Adams, Margaret Dragu, and Peggy Baker discuss their experiences and impressions of 15 Dance Lab in their roles as co-founder, artist and audience member, respectively.

All photos by Jenny McCowan

her body as words (2021)

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We’ve caught up to the COVID-19 pandemic in our blog’s timeline. Originally conceived for the stage, this worked morphed into a film and sound installation through necessity and a shared urgency to find a new way to present the piece between Peggy and her collaborators. Peggy writes:

From my earliest creations, a pervasive, underlying subtext of my work has been the embodiment of varied, authentic, and relevant images of women. Born in 1952, I came of age during the second wave of feminism, and as a young woman my notions of female identity were brought into focus largely through reading Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. In 2019, I discovered that the translation of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that I had read in my twenties was vastly abridged. Furthermore, the translation by H.M. Parshley ruthlessly revised the author’s Proustian style and philosophical language to conform to his own taste as a man of science. When I read the 2009 translation of the complete text by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, I was knocked over by the power of Beauvoir’s philosophical text and the epic proportions of her proposals. The force of this new encounter inspired me to create a work in which a group of dance artists brought forward current statements of female identity expressed in movement and in words. Originally conceived as a work for live performance, her body as words was ultimately realized as a series of short films.

The choreography arose from conversations concerning the philosophy, worldview, and lived experience of the dancers: Sze-Yang Ade-Lam, Nicole Rose Bond, Aria Evans, Syreeta Hector, Kate Holden, Tia Ashley Kushniruk, Alison Neuman, and Anisa Tejpar. Sierra Chin Sawdy, Katherine Semchuk, and Kirsten Sullivan joined the cast for larger group sequences designed as movement choruses. As a series, the dances and their accompanying text – written by each of the dancers – touch on themes of race, gender expression, sexual orientation, sexual appetite, pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, disability, physical labour, and aging.

Filmmaker Jeremy Mimnagh captured raw solo performances as a series of highly stylized films. The dancers emerge out of darkness, and while the films give a first impression of being shot in black and white, the lighting sources – revealed behind and to each side – produced an incredibly warm and glowing skin tone.  Sound designer Debashis Sinha built a sonic world by capturing and then layering breath, footfall, the rustle of fabric…

her body as words premiered in September 2021 as an integrated exhibition – with sound design accessed via a QR code – on media screens in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square; with a subsequent outdoor presentation on media screens for Festival Internacional Buenos Aires in February 2022. It was streamed world-wide as an on-demand film by Baryshnikov Arts Centre as part of their Spring 2022 programming; and presented in Dusseldorf, Germany as a lobby for installation for Internationale Tanzmesse 2022. In a public square, the films are experienced in relation to the advertising, architecture, traffic, and intersection of humanity present. Experienced in a gallery setting, each film – and its accompanying text and sound – is encountered on an individual monitor, and viewers move through the intimate installation at their own pace and according to their own interest. Wherever her body as words is encountered it clearly states, “We are here – just as you are – in the specificity of mystery, contradiction, eloquence, joy, struggle, loss, and accomplishment that is an individual life.” PB

How can we say the things that we feel? How much can we speak? What can we reveal? This. This mystery. It’s your story too. - P. Megan Andrews

For a very deep dive into the translation process undertaken by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, watch a panel event in 9 parts from Barnard College here on YouTube.

All photographs by Jeremy Mimnagh.

who we are in the dark (2019)

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We have arrived at another landmark production for Peggy’s company - a large-scale work with a cast of 7 contemporary dancers and 2 rock-star musicians performing live, which toured across Canada and internationally. Peggy writes:

The impetus for who we are in the dark was the urgency of seizing the moment with a new musical collaborator in the wake of a dazzling but brief first project. A 2015 commission from Fall for Dance North threw me together with the sensational indie-rock violinist Sarah Neufeld for a duet we titled fractured black. Sarah’s lyrics for the duet opened with the line, “who we are in the dark” and, with a ferocious appetite to carry on creating together, we zeroed in on that opening line, embracing darkness as the subject for a hugely ambitious project.

Our universe emerged out of darkness. Each of us emerged from the darkness of our mother’s womb, and darkness will swallow us when we die. We live with darkness as we live with light: the alluring darkness of night, intimacy, sexuality, the unconscious; the creeping darkness of uncertainty, malice, suspicion; the confounding darkness of bafflement, mystery, secrets, the unknown and the unknowable; the dreadful darkness of treachery, violence, cruelty, suffering, and grief; the comforting darkness of solace, condolence, and contemplation.

Rather than building the choreography in relation to music, I worked from text as a foundational source for movement invention. The words of Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Genet, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Henri Michaux, as well as my friend, Toronto poet and translator, Roger Greenwald, and even the horror writer Dean Koontz, are deeply seeded in the choreography. The dancers were crucial, primary collaborators in the creation of movement language. An intense period of initial movement exploration was undertaken with Kate Holden, Sarah Fregeau and David Norsworthy, and their artistry permeates the choreography. Every dancer in the studio during creation has also left their imprint: Sahara Morimoto, Mairi Greig, Jarrett Siddall, Benjamin Kamino, and Naishi Wang, as well as – very early on – Ric Brown and Corrado Cerruto.

A two-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity brought Sarah Neufeld into the studio with us, where she developed musical ideas in response to the choreography and where I choreographed to a wildly virtuosic violin solo she brought ready for a scene I hadn’t yet touched. Much of the score was composed in that glorious place during an intense period of undivided concentration that also included access to a theatre. This enabled our first experiments with projections by Jeremy Mimnagh and with the placement and movement of drops by visual artist John Heward, masterminded by lighting designer Marc Parent.

I’d known the work of John Heward since the 1980s. With black paint on un-stretched, repurposed rayon or canvas, torn and gouged with clamps, his works carry a physical history. John’s images had never been used as a part of a stage production before and I took the trust that he placed in me fully to heart. His ill health prevented him from being with us in Banff, and John’s death four months before the premiere marked the devastating loss of a great artist. Sharing the grief of his loss with his family, friends, and colleagues, we dedicated our work to his memory.

Fides Krucker created a remarkable vocal score for the dancers that wove their voices within the sonic design and elevated and amplified their embodiment in powerful and significant ways. Costume designer Robyn Macdonald designed a wardrobe in black, grey, and dark blue that included sheer, black hoodies – cut long and wide – that were worn in many of the scenes. Jeremy Mimnagh’s projections covered the full extent of the floor and the cyc and offered – among many visual pleasures – a startling technicolour finale in the closing scene. John Heward’s many drops slowly accumulated from one scene to the next before being violently torn down and thrown to the floor amid a cacophony of music and movement. Marc Parent – my primary collaborator since 1990 – worked closely with me on every single element of scenic design as well as devising tremendously evocative lighting that transformed the stage for each scene, focusing the visual richness of this work.

The intimate compositional collaboration between Sarah Neufeld and her Arcade Fire bandmate, drummer Jeremy Gara, was a constant source of intense inspiration for all of us, above all the dancers, who revelled in the music and their virtuosic musicianship.

Every planning meeting, design meeting, vocal warm-up, rehearsal, and costume fitting, every on-stage dance party called at the half hour by our tech team of Gabriel Cropley and James Kendal, honestly EVERY moment on this project was an occasion for the deep joy of collaborative creative work.

This was an epic project, and it COULD NEVER have been accomplished without the investment of the Canada Council; the Ontario Arts Council; the Toronto Arts Council; BMO Financial Group; the NAC’s New Creation Fund; the CanDance co-production partners Danse Danse (Pierre Des Marais and Caroline Ohrt), the National Arts Centre, (Cathy Levy), The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Fall for Dance North (Ilter Ibrahimof) and Canadian Stage (Matthew Jocelyn). And furthermore, this project COULD NEVER have been accomplished without my company’s manager Meredith Potter, whose vision, skill and care guided this endeavour. I am filled with gratitude to the splendid artists who went on this adventure with me.

premiere: February 21, 2019, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
for Canadian Stage & Fall for Dance North

subsequent performances: Danse Danse / Montreal, The Socrates Project / Hamilton, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, The National Arts Centre / Ottawa, Kingston, Whitehorse; The Cervantino Festival, Guanajuato, Mexico; The Holland Dance Festival, Den Haag, Netherlands.

dancers: Sarah Fregeau, Mairi Greig, Kate Holden, Benjamin Kamino / Lukas Malkowski, David Norsworthy / Calder White, Sahara Morimoto / Nicole Rose Bond, Jarrett Siddall / Jera Wolfe

All photos by Jeremy Mimnagh.

unmoored (2018)

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This week we hit the final solo that Peggy commissioned for- and performed- herself. A sequel to a work she premiered 14 years previously. Peggy writes:

In 2003 I turned to the extraordinary dance artist Sarah Chase to make a work for me. Sarah creates in a genre she describes as dancestories, and prior to working together she set me the task of writing two stories for every year of my life. When the time came to go into the studio together, I told Sarah that there was one aspect of my life that I hadn’t written about and could not share in the public sphere. Sarah agreed to my caveat, and we went on to create a very beautiful work titled The Disappearance of Right and Left. More than a decade later I went back to Sarah to let her know that I was now ready to think back on the events that I had previously held apart and to mindfully look to those events as the basis for the creation of a new dancestory.

In March of 2017, I sat down at a desk, in a small room, in the Bogliasco Foundation villa, where I was undertaking a 5-week fellowship in Italy. Guided by Jane Hirschfield’s extraordinary book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry , I wrote down the stories I had not been previously ready to share.  At the end of my residency I arranged the stories in a rough performance draft – incorporating some initial movement devised by Sarah – and shared the in-progress work that included a poem by Rumi as the final scene, with the other Bogliasco Foundation fellows.

In the months that followed, Sarah and I worked together to develop a choreographic staging to frame and hold a distillation of my writing as a dancestory titled unmoored. The episodes that I recount in unmoored describe events during the 20-year arc of my marriage to the musician, composer, and disability rights activist, Ahmed Hassan. The complex and emotionally charged themes of disability, caregiving, and death at the heart of this work are handled by Sarah with tremendous sensitivity.

One of the poems included in Hirschfield’s book struck an especially deep chord with me. This poem by the 13th century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen captures something essential about the utter emptiness of loss, and of how that empty space can in fact offer an opening for illumination:

unmoored
in midnight water
no waves, no wind
the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight

In addition to the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy, unmoored was created with the invaluable support of residencies at Tiamat House on Hornby Island B.C., (through the generosity of Judith Lawrence); and Ottawa Dance Directive, Artistic Director Yvonne Coutts / Associate Director Lana Morton. 

unmoored premiered at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, with subsequent presentations at The Citadel (Toronto), EDAM (Vancouver), ArtSpring (Salt Spring Island B.C.) Crimson Coast Dance (Nanaimo), and Ottawa Dance Directive.

Winner - Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in a Dance Production: Peggy Baker

“The work is one of total perfection as the heartbreaking text and Baker’s eloquent movement swing back and forth between darkness and light. “ Paula Citron 

“Chase has shaped a performance that Baker speaks, sometimes reading, sometimes reciting, raw in its emotion and polished in its performance. As an artist, Baker needed to make this dance story, for it marks the renewal of creativity, going forward with undying love on the wings of Rumi.”  Susan Walker

All photos below of Peggy Baker by Aleksandar Antonijevic.