armour (2007/2010)

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The final piece in Peggy’s watershed program Confluence at Harbourfront Centre in 2010 was a reworking of a Doug Varone piece, his fourth to be acquired for the company’s repertoire. Peggy writes:

In 2007 I was included in the cast of a full evening work with Doug Varone and Dancers titled Dense Terrain. This was a hugely ambitious project including 12 performers, projections, sets, and original music by Nathan Larson. One of the early influences on the work was The Lives of a Cell, a book by Louis Thomas published in 1974, and read by both Doug and I – and so many others of our generation – at the time. Many of the essays in this book focused on social insects, and a fascinating duet in Dense Terrain for Natalie Desch and Daniel Charon held a strong imprint of that source material.

I totally loved that duet! And I no longer remember if I asked Doug if I could learn it, or if he suggested it himself, but certainly it was beautifully aligned with my dances inspired by Sylvia Safdie’s films of insects, and by bringing it together with my solo earthling and the trio coalesce, it created a wonderful program. Taking the duet outside the context of Dense Terrain, Doug allowed me to commission sound design by Debashis Sinha (who had also scored earthling and coalesce) and titled this version of his dance armour.

Deb’s score supported every aspect of the dance, enriching the impact and significance of each action, while Marc Parent’s exquisite lighting required Larry and I to be spatially exacting with every single move.  

Visual artist Brian Kelley sketched, and later completed with water colour, a beautiful series of small works capturing this brief and perfect dance. 

“It is the being touched that counts, rather than the touching.” Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

“Baker and Hahn are here more like archetypes, elemental and distilled representations of the human need for connection beyond the stereotypical, emotionally overcharged and romantic dance duets we’re used to seeing. They insinuate themselves into each other’s embrace, isolated yet together, driven by forces more mysterious than they can apprehend.” - Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

“…as Mr. Sinha’s music slowly built what emerged was an intimate, human portrait. Remaining on the floor the dancers cycled through interlocking embraces. Their bodies fit like an endlessly mutable jigsaw puzzle: a universe of two.” Julia Cervantes, The New York Times

Home (1988, acquired in 2000)

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This week we look at another landmark work by American choreographer Doug Varone, the duet Home. Peggy writes:

I no longer remember if Doug Varone suggested the duet Home to me, or if I asked him about the possibility, but certainly by the time I learned it in 2000 I had seen it performed many times and admired it unreservedly. Home brings us into a domestic space shared by a couple, into the interior lives of each of them, and into the complexity of their faltering relationship. Doug scrupulously avoided dance movement within the choreography, instead mining the qualitative nuance of gesture, timing and proximity. The superb music for Home was composed by Dick Connette, a person dear to me as someone closely linked to my personal life in New York throughout the 1980s. The incredible resonance between the music and the choreography achieves a kind of perfection that has made this work timeless. Home is a touchstone in Doug’s repertoire; it is absolutely foundational to his body of work.

I have been fortunate to perform this superb duet many times over 20+ years, including the debut for my company shared with James Kudelka, whose tenderness and humility touched me very deeply; unforgettable performances with Doug at American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival; and most frequently with Larry Hahn, whose extraordinary gifts as a performer were honed through his long tenure with Doug Varone and Dancers. PB

Doug adds: There are few works in my repertory as cherished as Home, partly due to the timing of its creation early in my career. The exploration was to craft a simple, unadorned narrative work that employed very little discernible dance vocabulary, embracing only a human everyday quality of movement. This was essential to my trajectory as an artist and the dances that have spilled out of my brain since. I’ve often called the work a theater scene set to music and as the dance has matured with time, I have continued to strip away any further artifice from the choreography. This process began 12 years after the dance was originally made when Peggy acquired the work, and followed discussions we had about pairing it down further to reveal a physical truth that felt authentic to our age as performers. We explored time and gesture with a radically different approach, allowing for the subtlest of movements to speak volumes in ways they hadn’t before. It was a turning point for the dance and perhaps myself as an artist, to understand the great value of re-evaluation. This was not only true of the physical acts that drive the work, but also of the narrative itself to be more truthful and equal in its character’s journeys. Peggy brought a new depth to the work and in doing so asked essential questions of its integrity. That affect has been lasting in a work that has stood the test of time. 

 

In Thine Eyes (1996, acquired 1999)

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This week we are looking at an exceptional work from acclaimed choreographer Doug Varone, Peggy’s fellow performer from her years with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. Doug left Lar’s company in 1986 and was soon at the helm of his own, Doug Varone and Dancers, based in New York.

“In 1996 Doug organized his company as male/female couples and, shifting the primary cast with every rehearsal day, created a duet titled In Thine Eyes. The highly stylized movement he invented called on the dancers to move in stop-action, so that each moment in the choreography created a tableau. He arranged the space geometrically, with the dancers moving along strictly delineated pathways, corridors that eventually brought them together, throwing them directly into one another’s spheres and – with all the frission of a chemical reaction – into a highly stylised series of discrete choreographic episodes.  Doug had chosen as music, a selection of tracks from Michael Nyman’s Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, originally composed for an opera-ballet, La Princesse de Milan, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The episodic nature of the music – with male and female voices delivering a libretto that became abstracted because of the displacement of the narrative – created a sense that the man and woman dancing were motivated by impulses they did not comprehend while enacting rituals whose origins had been lost. But certainly, the two figures in the dance are driven by all the magnetism, vagaries, and intensity of love and lust.

Within a year of its premier, and before I had seen the work in performance, Doug contacted me to say that he had a dance that I should learn. The staging was undertaken by Gwen Welliver and Larry Hahn, members of Doug Varone and Dancers who had both been involved in the creation. Though I was preparing to perform with Doug, Larry was my partner throughout the rehearsal process, and Doug and I had only danced the work together twice prior to the opening night of my April 1999 Toronto season. Doug is an electrifying performer and being on stage with him in this magnificent work is one of the most profound experiences of my dance life. Every aspect of this work aligns with the highly distinctive aesthetic established by the choreography. Doug had envisioned the lighting, (realized by David Ferri), and it was both stunningly beautiful and devilishly tricky to dance in. Lynn Steincamp’s costumes were simple  and perfect – square cut, but in flowing fabrics that revealed the body.

Doug joined me for performances at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2001 and in 2006 the magnificent Larry Hahn and I did a five-city Canadian tour.

Oh, how I LOVE this dance! Doug is a master choreographer; his signature as a creator is unique and indelible. Eventually, my repertoire included five Varone duets: The Volpe Sisters, In Thine Eyes, Home, Heaven and armour. Each of them is a jewel.” PB

"This is dance at its very best, performed by two consummate artists, using the language of movement to trigger an emotional recognition that words could never achieve." Michael Crabb, The National Post

Listen to Richard Burton recite John Donne’s poem The Good Morrow, from which the title of this dance is sourced, here on Youtube.

Yang (1998/2003)

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Peggy is occasionally commissioned by other artists to make works for them - including Sarah Chase (Garland, 1996), Dancemakers (for Carolyn Woods, Rocket Girl, 1999), and Nova Bhattacharya (Map of the Known World, 2000). The only commissioned work from Peggy to be bought into the Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ repertoire is Yang, made for Sylvain Brochu in 1998. Sylvain writes:

“In 1997 I was awarded a Canada Council grant to commission solos from 5 selected Canadian choreographers. I had studied with Peggy, seen her perform, and was very inspired by her commitment and artistic integrity. Even though I had never been through a creative process with her I had a strong feeling that our connection would produce a powerful piece. Peggy knew me as a dancer and set up to create a dance that would greatly challenge me technically. I distinctly remember the main creation period: I had flown to Toronto for two weeks. The process was very demanding physically, but I applied myself wholeheartedly, and with a level of trust that I had not often experienced before. Yang turned out to be one of the strongest pieces of my solo repertoire, and was the ideal finale for my solo concert. I’m grateful for the gift of this dance, which lives on through successive generations of dancers.”

Peggy adds: “Like Sylvain, I still remember the intensity of the creative process for this dance. I went in from day one with the intention of developing an action language that would provide us with a challenging and exciting encounter, as Sylvain and I are dancers with extremely different movement sensibilities. That encounter was quickly informed by the androgyny we each embody. The forceful, strident movement vocabulary we were working with shifted me more into androgyny, and took Sylvain – a dancer whose movement signature is cushy and lush – further away from androgyny. In order to clarify our intentions, we focused on the qualities associated with the Taoist principle of yang, described as bright, hard, masculine, round, odd-numbered and upward moving. In the first phase of our work we developed the movement language, and in the second we arranged that material in relation to a riveting work called Frisking Prolationum for 11 Percussionists by the Belgian composer and filmmaker, Thierry de Mey.

Sylvain premiered Yang at the 1998 Dance in Canada Festival in Ottawa. Five years later, for The Choreographer’s Trust, I developed a duet version for Sylvain with the magnificent Shannon Cooney. This remains one of my favourite dances, and both the solo and duet versions have been staged many times by my company and The School of Toronto Dance Theatre.” PB

If you’re taken with the music of Thierry de Mey, watch this excerpt of a work he created with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker for Rosas entitled ROSAS DANST ROSAS.

Romeo and Juliet Before Parting (1989)

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James Kudelka has choreographed for many of the world’s leading ballet companies, as well as for smaller contemporary companies and ensembles. This week, Peggy reflects on her first work with him:

“James has been a hugely important presence in my life, and I was fortunate enough to work with him as a dancer on four very different works. The first, Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, was at his invitation and the others were commissioned by me: This Isn’t the End (1991), Pelléas et Mélisande (1997), and A Woman by a Man (2008). The first and last of these dances are duets, and they stand as the only male/female duets concerning relationship ever choreographed for me.

It was always thrilling to be in rehearsal with James – he works extremely quickly and likes to see the dancer working at the brink of their ability. For Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, Sylvain Lafortune and I were in almost constant contact, negotiating a succession of complicated lifts, precarious counterbalances and intricately interlocking actions. The complexity of the partnering was way beyond me, but between them, James and Sylvain were somehow able to teach me everything I needed to enter into the fray and reach the heart of the dance.”

James writes about this piece: “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting was initially commissioned for a film, Romeos and Juliets, produced by Rhombus Media. It was choreographed at the Montreal Danse studio on Rue St. André, and we used Paul-André Fortier’s table from his work Tell for the bed. Peggy was staying at my condo in Old Montreal with me, and Sylvain was at that point no longer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. It is remarkable that this dance lived on and found a usefulness for Peggy in her stage performances but also danced by new casts. Remarkably I think each new cast is still wearing the costume that Peggy purchased for herself in the ladies lingerie department at The Bay.

I wanted to begin the duet at on odd place musically. In the ballet this dance opens Act 3. There is a short overture to this act that I cut, so that the first sound we hear is the deep notes from the lower strings. Like a horrible feeling in your gut the morning after a boisterous one night stand, and the admission that life has changed and the characters have both won and are about to lose all at the same time. Love hurts.”

“On videotape, Peggy Baker is dancing a beautifully articulate Juliet to the familiar passionate violins of Prokofiev. But this Juliet is not fluttering demurely on her toes--she is barefoot, with starkly cropped blond hair and a solidly weighted sense of longing. In James Kudelka’s duet, “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting,” Baker strikes an exceptional balance between active and passive energies. Caressed and lifted by partner Sylvain Lafortune, she also makes some advances: holds him firmly, lowers him to the floor. She is the perfect postmodern romantic heroine, lyrically strong and muscularly delicate.” Jennifer Fisher, Los Angeles Times, 1996

Sylvain Lafortune was a guest faculty member at Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ August Intensive in 2018 and 2019 leading courses in Partnering. Read more about his approach here.