Beautiful Day (1992)

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The final work from 1992 is Beautiful Day, a duet by Mark Morris, created in part on members of his company, and in part on Peggy and her duet partner for this piece, Christopher House.

“It was with no small measure of regret that I left The White Oak Dance Project and the company’s repertoire of magnificent dances by Mark Morris. So once I was settled in Toronto I contacted Mark to ask if he might make a duet for Christopher House and me. I hadn’t yet had the chance to dance with Christopher, and I thought a duet by Mark would be a spectacular way of thanking him for The Windows, the solo he made for me in 1989. I also thought it would be a way of sharing some part of the incredible world that had opened up for me during my time in New York.

Mark had just begun a new duet with some of his company dancers – work he would have to interrupt to fulfill a commission for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens – and he suggested that Christopher and I work with him in Montreal, learning the first half of the duet from video of his dancers and then finishing the work with us to take back to his company. The time together was absolutely magical, and the duet a jewel!” PB

“I was working on Beautiful Day with three couples from my company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, at the same time as I was working in Montreal with Les Grands. Peggy, Christopher House, Teri Weksler (as my assistant) and I worked together to finish the piece. It was premiered by my dancers (originally Clarice Marshall and Keith Sabado) at the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom in 1992. The dance gets its title, and is set to, the aria “Schlage doch, gewünste stunde” from a rarely performed cantata (attributed to J.S. Bach, but unlikely) for alto voice, strings, and handbells. It is built on a study in combining angular momentum with spiral force, whatever that means. I must say, it was an enormous pleasure to work with Peggy and Christopher, both fabulous dancers, Canadian National Living Treasures, and my friends. And it’s a beautiful dance.” MM

Listen to a 1992 CBC radio interview with Peggy and host Vicki Gabereau here.
Read more about Melchior Hoffman, the more likely composer of the music than J. S. Bach here on Wikipedia
Read about the history of the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom in The New Yorker 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.