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

The Transparent Recital (2003)

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This week we look at a commissioned work from the hugely talented and irreverent Tedd Robinson. The Transparent Recital premiered in Toronto on a program entitled Home, and then toured to St. Mark’s Danspace in New York City, coinciding - purely coincidentally - with one of that city’s worst-ever blizzards, the President’s Day Blizzard in February 2003.

Of Tedd and this work, Peggy writes: Tedd Robinson had provided my very first opportunity for a solo concert in May 1990 as part of the 6th Festival of Canadian Modern Dance, an event he established in Winnipeg in 1985 and which flourished over seven years. He and I are part of the huge cohort of dancers who entered the dance world in the 1970s – both of us Libra Dragons born in 1952 – and nonetheless artists who have pursued very different paths. Tedd’s extraordinary signature as a solo performer in self-made works, and his far-ranging pursuits and accomplishments as a choreographer, artistic director, and mentor have made rich and profound contributions to Canada’s dance milieu over five decades and counting.

An admiring fan of his work, I took the opportunity of commissioning funds from Danspace Project in New York to invite Tedd to create a piece for me with cellist Shauna Rolston. Working with collaborators John Oswald (composer), Caroline O’Brien (costumes) and the late David Morrison (lighting), Tedd created a 30-minute work brimming with both poetry and peculiarity. My own reading of it cast Shauna and I as itinerant performers who each carried with us our childhood fantasies of being on stage. A suitcase I delivered from place to place finally came to rest beside a child-size chair in which I sat to open what turned out to be a victrola. I pulled a 78rpm recording out of a paper sleeve and when the needle was set down it played a recording of Shauna whistling a melody by Bach. After being seated on several of the full-size chairs ranged about the stage, Shauna also eventually arrived on a tiny chair where she took up her childhood instrument – a viola with an end pin – and played the music for the finale scene. Asked by Tedd for a possible title, I suggested The Transparent Recital and it sealed our work. PB

Tedd adds: When Peggy asked me to contribute a work to her repertoire, I was very honoured. We had known each other a long time and our aesthetics were complimentary but different.

I have found a rehearsal tape of the work and I am looking at it now as I write. Peggy is fearless, and what might seem comedic is just so broken and sad in my seeing of it, which I love. She makes this disjointed and non sequential and awkward movement narrative tell so many stories to me. There is posing in front of a microphone as if something important will be said then she walks away, to become a weird creature with thumb horns. Nothing makes sense, it is just so abstract. I would call it body intelligent abstract theatre, as Peggy’s body has so much intelligence.

I enjoyed watching the rehearsal tape so very much. So utterly odd! TR

“Baker shared the stage with one of Canada’s finest cellists, Shauna Rolston… As is so often the case with Tedd Robinson’s work, the ghost of René Magritte and his fellow surrealists seemed to be lurking in the background.” William Littler / The Toronto Star

To meet Tedd in the classic BathTub Bran series, visit YouTube here.

Black Border with Moving Figures (1994)

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Hot on the heels of the creation and performance of Brute to Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6, Peggy and Andrew immediately embark on another ambitious project.

“I had given Andrew a copy of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and our conversations around the provocations it offered served as the entry for a new work. Kandinsky proposed the act of painting as an improvisation with colour, shape, line and form “independent from visual reality” that brought into existence a painting that communicated with the viewer on such a deep and significant level that it had the power to raise their consciousness. Andrew and I both appreciated the scope of this proposal in relation to our own art practice, and set out to dismantle in some way the framework of a dance to music. Working in silence, I developed 15 choreographic scenes, while Andrew choose works by Liszt and Chopin that place especially heavy demands for subjective interpretation on the pianist.

Coming together for rehearsal, I started with my 15 scenes in chronological order and allowed them to migrate until they were arranged in a sequence that was exciting and fascinating to dance to the music of either composer. The costume pieces for me by Caroline O’Brien could be combined in various ways and each time I exited the stage I returned in a different variation of the many possibilities.

Black Border with Moving Figures was a grand experiment that opened important and far ranging conversations between Andrew and I. It pushed us each to think about our practice differently, and expanded and deepened our collaboration. But I was never convinced by the work we made, and after the premiere in Toronto and performances at The Kitchen in New York, we set this piece aside.”

"Baker in one of her most rigorously modulated performances complementing the fire of Burashko's interpretations of Liszt and Chopin..." Michael Crabb, Toronto Star

“Peggy Baker, who is performing at the Kitchen through tomorrow night with Andrew Burashko, a pianist and fellow Canadian, is a dancer of startling power and fascination.

Audiences lost no time noticing her in Lar Lubovitch's modern dance company, where from 1981 to 1988 her big-boned dynamism was used with passionate sweep. Appearing since then as a charter member of Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project and as a soloist, she has evolved into a dancer of striking physical projection.

Now in her own choreography, she knows how to focus on her expressive back and amazing long arms, fingers and legs; no one else dances with the same striking mix of formal severity, muscular force and strangely feminine allure.” Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times

To learn more about Kandinsky, begin here at artsy.net.
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