White Oak and the Great White North - 1990

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This week we take a brief break from looking back at the repertoire, and focus on Peggy’s decision to return to Canada from New York in 1990 - a pivotal career move that would present her with the opportunity to create her own company and artistic home for the next thirty plus years:

“I danced with the Lar Lubovitch Company for eight magnificent years. That experience delivered me into the deep physical poetry of Lar’s choreographic vision; into the thrilling raucous and thrum of life as a dancer in 1980s New York; out into the wide world on stages across the globe; and into the heart of myself as an artist. But as sometimes happens with a dancer and a choreographer, I eventually found myself out of sync with the evolving form and content of Lar’s work, and in the summer of 1988, I left the company to make the time and space to consider other possibilities for myself.

Over the next year I gave more of my time to teaching, looking for the voice and values that would emerge outside the framework of the company. I considered pursuing an apprenticeship with my teacher Jean-Claude West, but got side-tracked when I agreed to undertake a self-produced concert at Danspace Project, St Mark’s with two colleagues. When one of the dancers took another opportunity it was suddenly a concert of solos and duets. Now in my late thirties, I imagined that I might only dance for a few more years, so I began seeking out choreographers whose work I loved to make solos for me – Christopher House, Doug Varone, Annabelle Gamson, Molissa Fenley, Tere O’Connor.

And then, my relationship of six years suddenly collapsed. I needed to find a new place to live, but I was traveling so much to teach - and I was at such loose ends as a dancer - that I thought “where would I live if I wasn’t living here?” Vancouver? Too far away. Toronto? Going back and not forward. Montreal? Yes! It is a fantastic scene! I will learn to speak French! One of my closest friends lives there, and bang! he invites me to be his roommate! So I complete the Danspace concert with Janie Brendel, and I arrive at the home of James Kudelka in Montreal as the city is reeling and deep in mourning in the aftermath of the massacre at l’Ecole Polytechnique.

By January 1990, Tedd Robinson had programmed me for his Winnipeg dance festival in May, and James had introduced me to Marc Parent, a young lighting wizard who would be my lighting designer/technical director/stage manager for that first concert in Winnipeg. I arranged to revive Paul-André Fortier’s masterwork Non Coupable, learning the dance from Susan Macpherson who originated the solo.

Out of the blue I got a phone call from Barry Alterman, then the manager of Mark Morris Dance Group, to say that Mark was starting a new company with Misha (aka Mikhail Baryshnikov) called the White Oak Dance Project and would I join? So with my things from New York still in a storage unit in Montreal, and with the contents of one suitcase in the bureau of my bedroom at James’ apartment in the old city, I repacked my second suitcase and began shuttling between: Montreal; Winnipeg (where I debuted as a soloist and, oh yes, fell in love with someone who lived in Toronto); Jacksonville, Florida (the closest airport to the rehearsal location for the White Oak Dance Project) and New York (the second White Oak location); Durham, North Carolina (for a teaching gig at American Dance Festival); Toronto (because now I had Ahmed Hassan to visit!); and touring destinations across the US with White Oak.

After that rollicking ride with White Oak in 1990, I realized that what I wanted to do most was follow Misha’s example and be a dancer in charge of my own creative life. And so in December of that year, I found myself in Toronto, going forward and not backward. No master plan about a solo career; just a tremendous appetite to explore the solo form and to find out what would happen if I stepped into a studio alone and no one told me what to do.” - PB

For a window into the contemporary Euro-American dance scene in 1980s New York City watch Making Dances here.
For an expansive article on Mikhail Baryshnikov from 1998, read The Soloist in The New Yorker here.

Accident (1989)

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This week we look back at Peggy’s mentorship and work with American dancer and choreographer, Annabelle Gamson.

“More than any other artist in the mid-1970s, Annabelle Gamson initiated unprecedented attention to the history of American modern dance. Her musically inspired, passionate performances of dances, choreographed by Isadora Duncan and others in the early twentieth century, brought about a resurgence of interest in Duncan’s work and her legacy, modern dance. Although Gamson was in her forties when she began performing Duncan’s dances, the dynamic strength and maturity of her physical presence, crowned by a mane of long white hair, distinguished her as singularly original.” The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women

Peggy writes: “In my late thirties, eager to learn more about solo dancing, I sought out Annabelle as a mentor. She allowed me to take her classes alongside the extraordinary women in her group (including Roxane D’Orleans-Juste, Risa Steinberg and Nina Watt – all soloists with the Limon Company), and to understudy the historic works she was currently staging as well as the new group work she was creating. As a culmination of our work together, Annabelle choreographed two solos for me, Accident (1989) and Sand (1990).

Though she was working with her group mainly at the 92nd St Y in New York City, Annabelle was living outside the city, in Rye Brook, and all of our rehearsals took place in her home studio – an expansive space with a beautiful hardwood floor and wide windows, furnished only with a grand piano. For the weeks that we worked together I took morning class in the city, caught a train at Grand Central, was picked up at the station by Annabelle, and then rehearsed with her for 2 or 3 hours. Annabelle always insisted on giving me dinner before I left, and conversations over those meals were the occasion for stories about her childhood dance lessons, about Agnes de Mille and Anna Sokolow, about dancing on Broadway and with American Ballet Theatre, and about the interior world of the Isadora’s dances.

Accident was made in the wake of the death of a young woman – the child of one of Annabelle’s friends – in a car crash. It was a tragic dance, with sequences of jarringly brutal action, the body a distorted tangle. One day in rehearsal the images at play brought me to tears. Annabelle was shocked. “What ‘s wrong with you?” she demanded, “This isn’t happening to you, you’re telling the story.” Without that blunt intervention, some of the dances that lay ahead for me over the next decades could never have been navigated safely.” - PB

“Ms. Baker is a performer with a shining, expressive innocence and a body that is an astonishing collection of big bones and lithe muscles. Annabelle Gamson made inspired use of all that in ''Accident,'' set to a dark score by Francis Poulenc, in which a life seems to be relived in the moments right after an accident.” Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

Read more about Annabelle Gamson’s Isadora Duncan reconstruction project here on The New York Times.

Listen to dance legends discuss the home created for modern dance by the 92nd Street Y here.

Welcome to the Creation Catalogue Blog!

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We’re currently building a brand new website that Peggy has titled The Creation Catalogue. It will be an online searchable archive that documents more than 30 years of creation, production, touring and professional development undertaken by Peggy Baker Dance Projects.

The Creation Catalogue Blog will post features on the company’s history from Peggy and guest contributors. Our inaugural post is of course from the company’s founding artistic director, principal dancer until 2010, and now choreographer and choreographic director, Peggy Baker:

The photograph we’re using for the banner of The Creation Catalogue was taken by Josef Astor in New York City in 1992. Lise Friedman – a former Cunningham dancer who was then the editor of the award-winning quarterly, Dance Ink – arranged a shoot with Josef for a photo feature in the publication. I was instructed to arrive at a side door of Carnegie Hall, take the elevator to the sixth floor, then find a back staircase and climb a few steps to arrive on the eighth floor. (How does that work?) The apartments and studios of Carnegie Hall were famous for the artists living and working there and, (feeling like I really had no business being there), I hesitantly roamed the maze of corridors until I found Josef’s door. I knocked at a tempo approximating my nervous heartbeat. A tall and exceedingly handsome man with a glowing smile threw open his door to me. Light streamed through a huge slanting skylight onto the studio floor and a seamless paper backdrop. Josef took movement portraits of me in costume for my dance Sanctum, Mark Morris’s Beautiful Day, and Accident by Annabelle Gamson. I had also brought a long, deep purple stretch velour dress that I had found in a sale bin at Vivienne Westwood’s Soho shop a couple of days earlier and I put in on to improvise for the camera. The moment that Josef caught in this photo inspired the second of four dances in Her Heart, choreographed the next year. - PB

For more reading on Josef Astor and his Carnegie Hall studio, visit improvised life here.

Photos below of Peggy Baker by Josef Astor, appeared in Dance Ink Fall 1992 issue Vol 3 No. 3.