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.

 

Dreaming Awake (2008)

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In this week’s post, we look back at the third collaborative project with NY-based dancer and choreographer, Molissa Fenley.

Peggy writes: I was extremely excited to be working with Molissa Fenley again when we set out on the development of Dreaming Awake with a premiere expected early in 2007. I had always taken a huge amount of pleasure in the circuitous choreographic pathways of her dances and the ways in which she connects with musical landmarks, with the dancer navigating the architecture of the sound rather than the phrasing of beats. Dance adrift on an ocean of music.

For Dreaming Awake Molissa had chosen a piano work of the same name by Phillip Glass and used the music – which cycles in repeating loops – twice in a row. It was an interesting coincidence because I had chosen to do the very same thing the previous year with Karen Tanaka’s score for Krishna’s Mouth and I fully appreciated Mo’s desire to double it up.

Choreographically, Molissa set out a series of complicated phrases in what proved to be a first iteration, because before long the phrases were fragmented and rearranged many times over, sometimes doubling back to places on the stage and within the choreographic language that were maddeningly familiar. It felt something like being inside of an architectural construct by Escher and it was quite disorienting. In an early studio showing I became hopelessly lost when I discovered myself at the same intersection in the dance several times in a row, an experience I found completely unnerving.

While I was rehearsing Dreaming Awake I developed chronic pain in the third metatarsal of my right foot. It eventually proved to be a stress fracture, and I learned that it wasn’t going to get better unless I could stop altogether for many weeks. On the other hand, it had been hurting me for months without interfering with what I needed to accomplish, so I decided to go ahead with my planned 5-city tour (titled “3”) thinking that once it was finished I would take time off. Then, just days before leaving for Montreal, doing a simple transfer of weight to my right foot – (you’ve probably seen this coming) – I felt the bone snap and there was no longer any question about when I would stop so that the healing could begin.

Embarking on tour a year later, my foot was up to the physical challenge, but the complexities of finding my way through the labyrinth of steps in this gorgeous dance continued to threaten me with catastrophe. I finally premiered Dreaming Awake in Calgary, but that foot injury marked the beginning of slow shift in my thinking and eventually in my dance practice, one that led me to the role of choreographer of ensemble works.

The Disappearance of Right and Left (2004)

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This week’s work is a truly landmark piece in Peggy’s repertoire. A dancestory created with Sarah Chase, The Disappearance of Right and Left artfully shares stories from Peggy’s family history in a deeply compelling work that speaks to audiences across genres and generations.

Peggy writes: Sarah Chase is a superb artist whose body of work stands as an utterly unique and hugely valuable contribution to the art form. Sarah frames memoir within choreographic structures, combining text and movement in ways that allow the inner life and personal history of the performer to be drawn into alignment with the life experience and empathetic capacities of the audience witnessing the work.

I’m thinking that my own dance with spoken text (a true story, 1997) was made the same year that Sarah created her first dancestory, Muzz. Sarah’s dance was much longer and more complex structurally, but the biggest difference was that Sarah spoke in the first person – unabashedly using the identifier “I” – whereas I spoke in the third person, veiling my relationship to the events I described through the use of the descriptor “the woman”. A studio showing of Muzz by Sarah at Damn Straight on Spadina Avenue in Toronto remains an indelible memory and the power of the work, and of her performance, was absolutely the inspiration for approaching her with the idea of commissioning a work in this style for me.

Six months prior to going into the studio, Sarah assigned me the task of writing two stories representing each year of my life. 51 years old at the time, I needed to excavate 102 stories from my life. Conversations with my parents about my childhood also brought forward stories from their own lives and in the end, Sarah included stories that spanned five generations in my family.

The Disappearance of Right and Left emerged as a work of 45 minutes that was both terrifying and cathartic to perform. It revealed deep connections of experience and learning across the history of my family and allowed me to come to terms with some of the most dismantling turning points in my own life.

Sarah possesses the extraordinary ability to compose and direct performance works centered on personal history without ever veering into the trite or sentimental. Dancestories made for herself, for Marc Boivin, Andrea Nann, and a second work made for me in 2018, (unmoored), comprise a truly remarkable collection of works. PB

Sarah adds this: Peggy was a pivotal teacher, mentor and guide in my life, and I was thrilled and awed to be creating with her in 2004.

I loved how Peggy spoke when she taught, the vivid way she had with language, the colour of joy in her voice, and her inimitable gestures. I knew I wanted to make a work that would allow Peggy to speak stories from her life, to share her rich inner world, and to magnify her extraordinary gestures into a danced language. I wanted to understand her biography and how it had shaped the artist I loved, and if possible to reveal this to an audience.

These 102 stories/memories she assembled sparked deep conversation between us. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the many possible performance directions the material could take. (The first rehearsal we shared for a small audience was over an hour and a half long!) We ended up focussing on 12 stories that were moments when she or a member of her family, experienced a deep shift in perception, which we captured in the title.

To me, Peggy’s dancing contained the big dome of the high prairie skies around Edmonton where she grew up; the open geography of her childhood called forth in her long expressive arms and hands. So part of the beginning of the rehearsal process was creating a dance based on images and experience of being in that landscape. I wanted this to be the ground for the emotional stories that she would be sharing during the piece.

Peggy and I poured over photographs that represented the 12 essential stories we finally chose. In the first performed versions there was a large backdrop that had these double-sided images on it. They swivelled to reveal a full prairie landscape that was on the reverse of the 12 individual story images. I realised, eventually, that the backdrop was actually limiting the performances. Peggy’s gestures were conjuring so deeply the worlds of the stories, that having a literal photographic illustration behind her was an unnecessary distraction. We stopped using the backdrop.

This process was an incredible journey into Peggy’s inner life. It deeply changed the way I thought about creating, and continues to inform my work to this day. SC

“Disappearance is autobiographical…Chase makes full use of Baker’s wonderfully eloquent arms that carve the air in generous sweeping motions or settle momentarily into a detailed sculptural pose.” Michael Crabb , The National Post

The Disappearance of Right and Left is one of the few works in Peggy’s repertoire danced to music with lyrics. For a deep dive on Joni Mitchell’s classic song Amelia, selected by Peggy to feature in this show, visit jonimitchell.com

 

Unfold (2000)

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In 2000, the decade-long collaboration between Peggy Baker and Andrew Burashko sees them tackle a major new work suggested by Andrew: Aleksandr Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11. Peggy writes:

“Andrew had been proposing this work for some time, and the gift of commissioning funds from Symphony Space in New York and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa – with performance dates that fell just a month apart – provided the perfect opportunity for us to dedicate ourselves to the development of this demanding work. 

Like Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, (which served as his model), Scriabin composed a short work in each of the major and minor keys of classical western music, and despite this academic premise, his 24 pieces are charged with deep emotion. Some sound as though they are at a loss to complete themselves, while others give the impression that they are about to float apart, combust, collapse inward, or dissolve. A couple of them are as conclusive as a slammed door at the end of a heated argument. Taken as a group they propose what I can only describe as a self-portrait of the composer, and any pianist taking them on must transcend their highly personal specificity and bring a singular interpretation to the score.

I wanted to step up to the score on these same terms, discovering within the style and scope of the music a framework within which to reveal myself with immediacy and authenticity. Ultimately, Unfold offered the audience an intimate experience of Andrew and I as individual artists and as artistic collaborators, but also simply as very different people who have built a deep friendship by bringing our worlds together.

Unfold falls half-way through the 20-year arc of my shared performance life with pianist Andrew Burashko and looking back I see that this was the last of my choreographic works to be created with him; the new dances that followed for he and I were the work of others – Doug Varone, James Kudelka, and Molissa Fenley.” PB

“Baker’s angular, constructivist choreography seems a part of the music, another instrument playing the melancholy themes.  Sometimes she dances in silence… Sometimes Burashko plays alone.  In those passages the ghost of the music and the after-images of Baker’s movement are ever-present.” - Susan Walker, The Toronto Star

If you’re looking for any information on Aleksandr Scriabin, the Scriabin Association has you covered and then some.

loin, très loin (2000)

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We’ve reached the next - and largest - collaboration between Paul-André Fortier and Peggy Baker, an epic full-evening solo entitled loin, très loin which translates to far, very far. And that’s exactly where Paul-André took both Peggy and the audience for this work, to a place none of us had previously known existed…

“For several months at a time, during 1998 and 1999, I had the huge privilege and grand adventure of being included in quartet project with Fortier Danse Création in Montreal, La part des anges. The title, (which translates as “the angels’ share”), is a French idiom that refers to the small portion of alcohol lost through the wooden walls of barrels used for fermentation. Perhaps this title was a reference not only to what might be lost in translation, but also to what essence might be captured by bringing together four dancers whose foundation in the dance was dramatically different in each case. In his program note for this work, Paul-André describes me as coming from the world of modern dance; Gioconda Barbuto as being a classical dancer; and Robert Meilleur as a proponent of contemporary dance. I certainly took my own portion during this exceedingly rich and deep experience, and it has continued to work on me over the intervening decades.

Paul-André entered into creation by having each of us learn a recent solo of his, Novembre, and once we all landed with him through this dance he set out through far ranging choreographic experimentation to allow the quartet to arise. His point of view on this was that the dance was waiting in our bodies and in the space and that it would reveal itself through the tasks, proposals, and provocations he set forward. We worked in silence and through a broad range of “atmospheres “ in the studio. Some days were charged with the rigour of copying or improvising, some rode on exuberant joy and hilarity, others were austere and saturated with the weight of significant gestures and choreographic interactions. We worked as a quartet, as re-coupling couples, as soloists. For scenes in which all of us did not dance, the others stood in an upstage centre antechamber as witnesses.

It was thrilling to be on stage with great dance artists in this superb work in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. A year later, Paul-André brought us back together, (with the stellar Lisa Kovacs rather than Gioconda, who was now a dancer with NDT3) and we remounted the dance during a 3-week residency in Angers, France followed by performances in Bordeaux. One night, returning to the hotel from the theatre, Paul-André and I improvised together as we crossed a bridge, and it suddenly hit me very hard how much I was going to miss being a part of his work and world. The next day I gathered up my courage and asked Paul-André if he would consider allowing me to perform a program made up of his short works – Non Coupable, Novembre (which had struck a deep chord in me), my duet from La parts des anges with Robert Meilleur, plus something new for me. When Paul-André’s eyes widened and he said quite simply “Non”, I felt the terrible thud of refusal, and the humiliation of having stupidly trespassed beyond the scope of our relationship. And then he immediately said, “I prefer to make you a full-evening solo”. Within a year, he had done just that.

I wrote a program note for this dance that has become more fully realized with each passing year:

I have become a very different dancer, even in some way a reinvented woman, by virtue of being set in motion by Paul-André Fortier. It is as if his dance asks, “What if this had been the case? Would you not now have become someone else?” So embodying a rewritten history, I navigate a new fate.” PB

Paul André adds: “This piece was created extremely quickly. In fact Peggy struggled to remember all the material I was creating, so swiftly did the ideas come tumbling out. The choreography, costuming, lighting and the music all worked in tandem, feeding Peggy’s interpretation. It was the most demanding solo Peggy had ever performed. The multitude of performances at Montreal’s Agora de la danse seemed as daunting as climbing Mount Everest. And what a magnificent ascent!”

“It would be impossible to overstate the gravitas of this work… The revolutionary ethos of Fortier’s own early years…are summoned forth here by the acid guitar solos of Gaetan Lebœuf’s original score.” Michael Scott / The Vancouver Sun

Watch a short film made about Paul-André Fortier, released by the National Film Board here on the occasion of the 2012 Governor-General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

One of the most daunting challenges I have encountered in my dance life was an hour-long solo, loin, trés loin, created for me by Paul-André Fortier. It went absolutely against the grain of my technique and physicality. I couldn’t tell without the feedback of the rehearsal director, Ginelle Chagnon, whether I was inside or outside the aesthetic. The dancing was grueling to the point that I could barely get through it, and it left me thoroughly battered and spent. This was a solo made expressly for me, and I was terrified that I would humiliate myself as a performer and fail Paul-André as a creator. But some extraordinary things can happen when we are thrown beyond the outer reaches of our comfort zone and we are required to embody a physicality far removed from the self-image we like to affirm. Our strengths and weaknesses are laid bare; we are forced to deal with things we’d rather avoid; we see, and are seen, through a new lens; everything is at stake, so now there is something of real interest and importance to share. My program note for loin, trés loin was a thank you note to the choreographer for helping me to move beyond myself and toward something higher:

 I have become a very different dancer, even in some way a reinvented woman, by virtue of being set in motion by Paul-André Fortier. It is as if his dance asks, “What if this had been the case? Would you not now have become someone else?” So embodying a rewritten history, I navigate a new fate.  

As dancers, we are shaped by the works we perform, and that impact goes beyond our professional lives, directly to the personal sphere. As choreographers, we express ourselves on a kinesthetic and aesthetic level, but that expression is a direct translation of our imaginative, experiential, and intellectual lives, our basic humanity.