Night Garden (2012)

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By 2012 Peggy was well and truly bitten by the Nuit Blanche bug, and set out to create her third installation for Toronto’s all-night celebration of contemporary art. She writes:

The Betty Oliphant Theatre at Canada’s National Ballet School is a big, square auditorium fronted by the façade of a Victorian house that was designed by Jack Diamond. Seating for an audience of 260 rises for 8 rows from the main floor with a large balcony and box seating on both sides above. Surprisingly, the 8 wide rows of upholstered seats may be accordioned back to fit under the balcony, revealing an expansive floor directly in front of the stage.

Wanting to do something special and unexpected for Nuit Blanche, I was extremely excited about staging a work that could proceed with interruption for a full 12 hours on the house floor of the theatre, with the audience watching from above on three sides and coming and going freely throughout the duration of the work. To add to the surreal beauty of this overhead view, Larry Hahn created a set of 12 standing lamps – each with an undulating silver stalk crowned with a glowing white cone – that were arranged in clusters throughout the space. 

Sourcing and then reworking foundational material from coalesce and Piano/Quartet, I developed a 20-minute choreography to be performed successively by four different casts, and with each cycle overlapping in the last few minutes as the work was passed on to the next trio. The extraordinary dancers for this project were Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Kate Holden, Benjamin Kamino, Megumi Kokuba, Amanda LaRusic, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, Jessica Runge, Stephanie Tremblay Abubo, and Natalie Westerbeek. The dancers’ black sequined costumes – each one unique and artfully crafted by Jennifer Dallas – glinted in the glowing lamplight, while a gentle, shimmering score by Debashis Sinha resonated throughout the space.

The emotional potency of this durational dance worked on me more and more deeply as the night progressed, and when the final cycle was completed and the space was left empty, and then quiet, and then dark, I was overwhelmed by the feelings of profound grief I had been carrying for the 20 months since the death of my husband.

Piano Quartet (2012)

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Having created three works to piano music by John Cage – In a Landscape, Why the Brook Wept, and furthermore – and with a deep appreciation of his tremendous influence on the development of western music forms, Peggy marked the 2012 centenary of Cage’s birth with a new work in his honour. Peggy writes:

Immediately following its publication in 1996, I began working my way through the dense and stimulating MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words Art Music (John Cage, Joan Retallack). Cage had died four years earlier, and this book documented an extraordinary series of in-depth interviews in the last months of his life during which he reflected upon the full breadth of his artistic endeavours. Among countless pleasures, this book provided my first encounter with Cage’s poetry. More than any other writing I know, Cage’s poems (he calls them mesostic texts) feel to me like choreography – in the way that a single idea is pulled apart and reconfigured over an expanse of time, moving beyond the explicit language employed to call up images and juxtapositions that emerge, transform, catalyze and dissolve.

As the centenary of Cage’s birth approached, I began experimenting with his mesostic texts as the basis for movement scores. The process was instantly exciting and generative, so I began listening in earnest to his many works for prepared piano. Commissioned to create a brief solo for dancer Brian Lawson, I chose Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp, composed in 1947, and the beauty and fascination I found in that first dance led directly to the decision to tackle Cage’s epic Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.

Piano/Quartet arose through that foundational solo for Brian Lawson (who worked alongside Sahara Morimoto); through subsequent choreographic research during two residencies in Philadelphia (Dance Advance, Pew Centre for the Arts and Heritage / Bill Bissell, director) involving dancers Gregory Holt, Bethany Formica and Shannon Murphy, and ultimately through intensive work with dancers Ric Brown, Sean Ling, Andrea Nann, and Sahara Morimoto.

Caroline O’Brien created a sensational wardrobe that allowed the dancers to switch up costume pieces for each scene; Marc Parent devised a gorgeous and eventful lighting design; and the production was completed with a series of beautiful, painterly projections by Larry Hahn. Upstage centre seated at a grand piano, completely unflustered by the flashing changes in the lighting and projections, and by the rustle, footfall, heavy breathing and constant movement of the dancers, pianist  John Kameel Farah gave an astonishing series of virtuosic performances of some of the 20th Century’s most challenging and daring music. PB

“…mesmerizing…Epic in scope, inventive in structure and emotionally nuanced…” Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

Aleatoria (2010)

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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.

Find out more about the hurdy gurdy here on YouTube.

Film-maker Midi Onodera captured time-lapse movies. You can watch them here on her website.

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

 

In a Landscape (1995)

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The music and influence of John Cage is peppered throughout Peggy’s work, and it all began back in 1995…

“Pianist Andrew Burashko and I often gave one another books or CDs as gifts, and for our opening night at The Kitchen in New York in 1995, he gave me a CD of solo piano music by John Cage performed by Stephen Drury. The first track on the album was a piece from 1948 entitled In a Landscape. I instantly feel in love in with the music’s gently cascading melodies and the cresting and lulls of its compositional asymmetries. I lucked into an opportunity to perform a new work for fFIDA, (Toronto’s sadly no-longer Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists), and because Andrew was elsewhere, teamed up with pianist Henry Kucharzyk for the premiere.

The music took me inside of what I described then as my “creature body” – an interior world of sensations and movements riding the contours of joints and the pathways of blood, bone and muscle. The cycles of ritual that emerged elicited fragile balances and distortions that carved the lines of movement like the scarring and pruning used to cultivate a bonsai. Though this dance is brief, it moves through a timeframe that opens and elongates every second. The original staging of this work included a stunning costume by Jane Townsend – a kind of cocoon for the torso that left my bare arms and legs looking like the appendages of an insect – and a set of sculptural pieces by Kurt Swinghammer, some of which glowed at various times. Marc Parent, who lit this original version, later created a completely different treatment that called on the dancer to navigate a constantly morphing circle of light (imagine a rotating lava lamp projected onto the floor) that was devilishly difficult to balance within and which gave the impression of a dancer moving on a surface sliced out of the Milky Way.  

I hold dear performances of In a Landscape with Henry, and later, and over many years, with Andrew. Performances of this dance by others, most especially Christopher T. Grider, Tanya Howard and Andrea Nann, have moved me deeply. “ PB

"A finely crafted solo, with carefully articulated movement perfectly matched to a John Cage composition." - Lewis Hertzman, Dance Magazine

“The estimable Andrea Nann puts her personal stamp on Baker’s 1995 solo In a Landscape; the choreographer’s own remembered presence in the same work hovers like a distant echo.” - Michael Crabb , The Toronto Star

Listen to Kurt Swinghammer being Interviewed by Steve Waxman here on The Creationists.
Watch the documentary John Cage. From Zero here on YouTube.