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.

 

Krishna’s Mouth (2006)

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Having first worked together in 1999 on Words Fail, and then in 2003 on The Transparent Recital, Peggy Baker and cellist Shauna Rolston team up for a third collaboration called Krishna’s Mouth in 2006.

Peggy writes: For an outdoor performance in the Toronto Music Garden on Queen’s Quay West Shauna and I performed a version of The Transparent Recital tailored to the setting, and to complete the program I asked her to open with a work that she would perform without me. Shauna chose Songs of Songs, a gorgeous work for cello and tape by Japanese/American composer Karen Tanaka. I instantly fell in love with this score, its slow spirals of melody tenuously interlacing and then floating apart on the currents of the underlying drone, and with crystalline bells piercing the undulating surface of the sound.

I reached out to Ms. Tanaka immediately to explore the possibility of choreographing a solo to this piece and when it turned out that no recording existed that I might work with she allowed me to arrange a recording session with Shauna. I took the recording with me to Circuit-est in Montreal where a teaching residency included studio time for my own creative work. I have vivid memories of the sound resonating in the spare studio and of the strong pull of the music into an unexpected narrative sphere.

I had been pouring over Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, a book in which she brings together myths and stories from across epochs and cultures as a way of contemplating how one might come to terms with the underlying existential sorrow of human life. At the time, I had just made the huge and dismantling shift from being my husband’s primary caregiver (he lived with a particularly aggressive and chronic form of multiple sclerosis) to his living in long-term care, and the sadness and guilt attached to this situation was tremendous. One story in Dillard’s book struck a particularly deep and resounding chord for me. It is a story about Lord Krishna as a baby. He’s with his mother, in a garden, and he’s crawling on the ground. He grabs a clod of earth and puts it in his mouth. His mother slaps his hand away, and when she reaches in to clean out the dirt, she sees the entire universe in his mouth. As a caregiver to my husband, I had felt as though he needed me to guide him and keep him safe, but this story turned that idea on its head and proposed him as my teacher, which he surely and far more truly was.

In dancing this work I speak this story out loud, many times. I understand that this story is not mine to tell. But it is a story that I needed to hear, a story that somehow found its way to me, and a story that lives in my body.

Geometry of the Circle (1993)

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Now well into the third year of Peggy Baker | Solo Dance, Peggy is generating much of the new work herself, collaborating largely with Toronto-based musicians and composers. This early period of her work as a choreographer established live music as a distinguishing feature, with the musician not present as an unseen accompanist, but as an equal performance partner alongside her onstage.

“For this second work together, Ahmed Hassan and I started by reversing the rules we’d established for Sanctum, in which we were set far apart, each confined to our own small rectangle of space, and for which Ahmed’s music was comprised purely of percussive sound. For this new work, we had sculptor Janet Morton create a set of three objects to define the circumference of a circle, and Ahmed and I discovered and pursued one another within this miniaturized world. We thought of ourselves as entities with distinctly different modes of expression and communication: Ahmed a creature for whom sound was primary, and me a creature of gesture and action. Wearing a wireless mic, Ahmed careened about the space in his manual wheelchair while I bounded and scampered away from him and toward him, finally meeting face to face, stepping inside the footrests of his chair, grasping him by the shoulders, and lowering myself to squat back on my heels while we met eyes and he “sang” to me.

An invitation to revive Geometry of the Circle for performances as part of the cultural celebrations for the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver led to a decade of rich collaboration with the vocalist Fides Krucker. First interpreting and reconstructing Ahmed’s extraordinarily eccentric vocal score, Fides then taught it to performer Mark Brose, coaching him in the intricacies of a virtuoso performance that he shared with two exquisite dancers: Alison Denham and Sahara Morimoto.

Geometry of the Circle is as dear to me as a love letter, inscribed with the disappearing ink of live performance.” PB

"Hassan...earthbound...confined to a wheelchair... (Baker) his velvet-jointed sylph...a celebration of mutual power, and of constructive differences." - Robert Everett-Green / Globe and Mail

Read about Janet Morton knitting a cozy for an entire house on Ward’s Island here on Torontosavvy.com. For a more academic analysis of Janet’s work, read Emily Jane Rothwell’s Master’s Thesis here.

Her Heart (1992-93)

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This week Peggy looks back at a work that is very close to her, inspired by her mother, Rean Smith:

From 1991 to 1994 I was director of the summer dance program at Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain, and I often stayed on in Vancouver to teach for EDAM at the Western Front. Peter Bingham had picked up the reins of EDAM as Artistic Director in 1989, (it had been a collective that included my husband Ahmed Hassan up to that point), and during those Vancouver teaching stints Ahmed and Peter and I spent a huge amount of time together – sharing meals, discussing art and politics, listening to music. One evening Peter put on a record of late piano music by Johannes Brahms and the Opus 117 and 118 Preludes immediately suffused me in waves of memory connected to my mother.

In 1992, I was invited to create a work for Joysanne Sidimus and Susan Macpherson for a gala in support of the Dancer Transtion Resource Centre, and I took this as an opportunity to work with Opus 117 No. 1. As I made this duet I held the image of my mother at her age at that time, 64. My mother was just 24 when I was born, and other of the preludes captured vivid memories of her in her thirties (Opus 118 No. 2), forties (Opus 117 No. 2) and fifties (Opus 117 No. 3). In 1993, I distilled the duet into a solo and brought it together with the other preludes in a work I titled Her Heart.

My mother died in 2018, a few months before her ninetieth birthday, and only a matter of weeks before a concert in Toronto for which the superb dancer Jessica Runge would perform Her Heart. The great Brahms interpreter Peter Longworth was to have performed with Jessica, but he went into the hospital just days before the opening and tragically died soon afterward at the age 53. With just three days to prepare, pianist Cheryl Duvall stepped forward to play the Brahms in a series of performances that held love and longing and a profound sense of loss. - PB

"A rhapsodic memory dance addressing themes of the aging woman." Elissa Barnard / Chronicle Herald / Halifax

For an introduction to the music of Brahms visit The Guardian here.

Sanctum (1991)

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We’re in 1991 now, with Peggy living and working in Toronto under the moniker Peggy Baker | Solo Dance, the precursor to today’s company, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, creating her first collaboration with composer and musician - and now her husband! - Ahmed Hassan.

“Sanctum holds a very significant place in my creative life. It marks new commitments: to Ahmed Hassan and his daughter Shireefa; to Toronto; and to a mindful and devoted practice as a solo dancer. Sanctum proposes artistic practice as spiritual practice, and delineates a tightly circumscribed space for each performer: the dancer standing in a rectangle of light marked at the corners with short dowels; the musician, cross-legged on a carpet, his instruments arrayed within reach. Even as I describe this, I feel myself falling into the measured tempo of ritual, within which each gesture and sound arrives with purpose and immediacy.

During the creation of Sanctum I had vivid memories of being in the presence of Martha Graham as an aspiring dancer – one in which she dared us students to declare, “I am a dancer, now,” and another in which she offered my name to me anew by inscribing in a book about her work, “For Peggy Baker, best wishes for her life and work, Martha Graham”. I felt the indelible influence of her technique in the shapes and dynamics of the choreography. I felt myself as a dancer whose work arises through the echoes and imprints of legacy as well as through the complexities and details of a unique life.“ - PB

Peggy gifted Sanctum to Nova Bhattacharya and Helen Jones as part of her Choreographer’s Trust project in 2002/03. Read more about the Choreographer’s Trust here.
For insight into Ahmed Hassan’s work as a composer, watch this 1986 video of Blue Snake, commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada from Robert Desrosiers, Ahmed Hassan and John Lang.