Aleatoria — Creation Catalogue Blog — Peggy Baker Dance Projects

Aleatoria marked the beginning of a new series of dances developed over the next five years. The first of these was Aleatoric Duet No. 1 with Nova Bhattacharya, a radiantly charismatic and hugely accomplished dance artist with a grounding in the South Asian form of Bharatanatyam.

Peggy writes: Nova and I shared an on-going exchange around solo practice, initiated in 2000 by the impact of seeing her perform her stunning solo Maskura. She commissioned Map of the Known World from me in 2002, and that same year I passed on Sanctum – an early solo of mine – to Nova with her collaborative partner, musician Ed Hanley. Invited by curator Sara Palmieri to share a concert at the Centre for the Arts at Brock University, St. Catharines, Nova and I took the opportunity to perform a duet extrapolating on the organizing principles used for Aleatoria.

Every dancer carries indelible movement memories, and the idea of mining traces of past choreography that reside in the body rather than focusing on the development of new movement material excited me as an opportunity to attend exclusively to elements of composition. Nova focused her attention on the traces of my choreography she held, allowing those movements to change and develop outside of the original choreographic structures from which they had emerged. I dealt with assembling the movement material through rhythmic and spatial counterpoint; orchestration relative to the density of action, shifts in tempo, quality, and relationship. When lighting designer Simon Rossiter came in to watch and makes notes on the choreography, he interpreted each solo as taking place in its own clearly delineated space and made a diagram of two overlapping but offset rectangles. This interpretation – which had not occurred to me – was completely convincing and we decided to amplify this reading of the dance by marking each rectangle with a frame taped onto the floor.

Our concert opened with Maskura, followed by Krishna’s Mouth, Map of the Known World, Strand, and then Aleatoric Duet No. 1. No photographs of the duet exist, but the single shot of Nova and I together in Aleatoria at Nuit Blanche, captured by Omer Yukseker, holds an intimation our dance. And in the poetry of resonance that so often arises when different art works are brought into conversation in a gallery, a playlist, or a dance concert, the program note that Nova wrote for her opening solo reads, “Maskura is a requiem, offering the hope that what is remembered will never be lost.”

Photo of Nova Bhattacharya and Peggy Baker by Omer Yukseker.

Peggy was bitten by the Nuit Blanche bug early! After creating move in 2009, she followed up the next year with a new, all-night durational work, Aleatoria.

Peggy writes: Debashis Sinha was my Musical Director for the premiere of move at Nuit Blanche, and he had brought in some other improvising musicians who all played together, switching off as to who was leading. Phil Strong, Ben Grossman and John Gzowski joined Deb, and the shifts in the sonic environment throughout the 12 performances between 7pm and 7am offered tremendous support and stimulation to the performers.

Ben gifted each of us involved in move with his new double CD release, Aleatoric Solo Duets for Electro-Acoustic Hurdy Gurdy. The two CDs were designed to be played simultaneously with each CD player set to shuffle so that the tracks – which were varying lengths – constantly recombined. I LOVED this concept as a premise for a durational dance and immediately beginning planning for Nuit blanche 2010.

I brought together 11 dancers who had been involved in past performances of my work and asked them to call up any movement memories they carried from those dances and to use them as the basis for improvised episodes that would last 10 minutes. ‘Aleatoric’ means randomly or by chance and taking that invitation we used a chance procedure to determine the order of dancers each hour. The 12-hour performance began with a single dancer who was joined by a second dancer after 5 minutes and replaced by a third dancer at the 10-minute mark and so on and so on throughout the night. I joined Kate Alton, Nova Bhattacharya, Sylvain Brochu, Sarah Fregeau, David Houle, Sasha Ivanochko, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, Jessica Runge, and Brodie Stevenson – each of us dancing as soloists but also spontaneously creating duets with one another to Ben’s gorgeous music as it spun out over the hours.