Heaven (2003)

/

This week we continue to look at a rich period before and after the turn of the millennium, during which Peggy worked with master choreographers from across Canada and the USA. We’ve arrived at the creation of Heaven for Peggy and pianist Andrew Burashko by award-winning NYC-based choreographer, Doug Varone.

Peggy writes: In 2003 Doug Varone brought together a quartet of dancers for a concert at Jacob’s Pillow titled Short Fictions. Esteemed Limon dancer Nina Watt, Varone Co. veteran Larry Hahn, and I were all in our fifties – with Doug not far behind – all of us baby-boom dance-boomers crossing a fifth decade threshold that had been extraordinarily rare in the previous generation. The program opened with Four Piano Pieces, the first three all Varone masterworks – Nocturn (Chopin), Aperture (Schubert), and Short Story (Rachmaninoff) and it closed with a new work for me with pianist Gabriela Imreh, Heaven, to Cesar Franck’s Prelude, Fugue and Variations.

Heaven is kind of memory play in which the pianist and the dancer each seem to be alone remembering the other. I push against the piano, lean into it and stroke its surfaces. At one point I withdraw the stick holding the piano’s lid open and it slams closed. I sit on the bench back-to-back with the pianist; take their shoulders in my hands and move them; touch their head; lift their hands from keyboard; and even play some of the notes myself. The disruptions to her physical rapport with the piano were, understandably, unsettling to Gabriela, and the tensions provoked became central to the experience of the performance and to the images and associations that arose for the audience.

From the outset, Heaven was intended for my own repertoire, and Doug created it with Andrew Burashko and I.  I remember us working in a New York studio with Andrew playing an upright piano with a table set against the side edge of the keyboard so that I could approximate movements against, along, and over it. Andrew was not thrown off at all by the extent and frequency with which the choreography implicated him. The one exception was when I played notes of the music, and due to his precise ear, my touch and timing required on-going coaching.

This work, with its evocations of absence and longing arising from music, holds in it the essence of my experience now, in hearing the music I once lived in as a dancer. - PB

For Facebook people, watch the performance of Heaven in full here on the Art of Time Ensemble Page.

Doug Varone’s Aperture can be seen on Youtube here and Short Story can be viewed here.

Unfold (2000)

/

In 2000, the decade-long collaboration between Peggy Baker and Andrew Burashko sees them tackle a major new work suggested by Andrew: Aleksandr Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11. Peggy writes:

“Andrew had been proposing this work for some time, and the gift of commissioning funds from Symphony Space in New York and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa – with performance dates that fell just a month apart – provided the perfect opportunity for us to dedicate ourselves to the development of this demanding work. 

Like Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, (which served as his model), Scriabin composed a short work in each of the major and minor keys of classical western music, and despite this academic premise, his 24 pieces are charged with deep emotion. Some sound as though they are at a loss to complete themselves, while others give the impression that they are about to float apart, combust, collapse inward, or dissolve. A couple of them are as conclusive as a slammed door at the end of a heated argument. Taken as a group they propose what I can only describe as a self-portrait of the composer, and any pianist taking them on must transcend their highly personal specificity and bring a singular interpretation to the score.

I wanted to step up to the score on these same terms, discovering within the style and scope of the music a framework within which to reveal myself with immediacy and authenticity. Ultimately, Unfold offered the audience an intimate experience of Andrew and I as individual artists and as artistic collaborators, but also simply as very different people who have built a deep friendship by bringing our worlds together.

Unfold falls half-way through the 20-year arc of my shared performance life with pianist Andrew Burashko and looking back I see that this was the last of my choreographic works to be created with him; the new dances that followed for he and I were the work of others – Doug Varone, James Kudelka, and Molissa Fenley.” PB

“Baker’s angular, constructivist choreography seems a part of the music, another instrument playing the melancholy themes.  Sometimes she dances in silence… Sometimes Burashko plays alone.  In those passages the ghost of the music and the after-images of Baker’s movement are ever-present.” - Susan Walker, The Toronto Star

If you’re looking for any information on Aleksandr Scriabin, the Scriabin Association has you covered and then some.

Home (1988, acquired in 2000)

/

This week we look at another landmark work by American choreographer Doug Varone, the duet Home. Peggy writes:

I no longer remember if Doug Varone suggested the duet Home to me, or if I asked him about the possibility, but certainly by the time I learned it in 2000 I had seen it performed many times and admired it unreservedly. Home brings us into a domestic space shared by a couple, into the interior lives of each of them, and into the complexity of their faltering relationship. Doug scrupulously avoided dance movement within the choreography, instead mining the qualitative nuance of gesture, timing and proximity. The superb music for Home was composed by Dick Connette, a person dear to me as someone closely linked to my personal life in New York throughout the 1980s. The incredible resonance between the music and the choreography achieves a kind of perfection that has made this work timeless. Home is a touchstone in Doug’s repertoire; it is absolutely foundational to his body of work.

I have been fortunate to perform this superb duet many times over 20+ years, including the debut for my company shared with James Kudelka, whose tenderness and humility touched me very deeply; unforgettable performances with Doug at American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival; and most frequently with Larry Hahn, whose extraordinary gifts as a performer were honed through his long tenure with Doug Varone and Dancers. PB

Doug adds: There are few works in my repertory as cherished as Home, partly due to the timing of its creation early in my career. The exploration was to craft a simple, unadorned narrative work that employed very little discernible dance vocabulary, embracing only a human everyday quality of movement. This was essential to my trajectory as an artist and the dances that have spilled out of my brain since. I’ve often called the work a theater scene set to music and as the dance has matured with time, I have continued to strip away any further artifice from the choreography. This process began 12 years after the dance was originally made when Peggy acquired the work, and followed discussions we had about pairing it down further to reveal a physical truth that felt authentic to our age as performers. We explored time and gesture with a radically different approach, allowing for the subtlest of movements to speak volumes in ways they hadn’t before. It was a turning point for the dance and perhaps myself as an artist, to understand the great value of re-evaluation. This was not only true of the physical acts that drive the work, but also of the narrative itself to be more truthful and equal in its character’s journeys. Peggy brought a new depth to the work and in doing so asked essential questions of its integrity. That affect has been lasting in a work that has stood the test of time. 

 

In Thine Eyes (1996, acquired 1999)

/

This week we are looking at an exceptional work from acclaimed choreographer Doug Varone, Peggy’s fellow performer from her years with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. Doug left Lar’s company in 1986 and was soon at the helm of his own, Doug Varone and Dancers, based in New York.

“In 1996 Doug organized his company as male/female couples and, shifting the primary cast with every rehearsal day, created a duet titled In Thine Eyes. The highly stylized movement he invented called on the dancers to move in stop-action, so that each moment in the choreography created a tableau. He arranged the space geometrically, with the dancers moving along strictly delineated pathways, corridors that eventually brought them together, throwing them directly into one another’s spheres and – with all the frission of a chemical reaction – into a highly stylised series of discrete choreographic episodes.  Doug had chosen as music, a selection of tracks from Michael Nyman’s Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, originally composed for an opera-ballet, La Princesse de Milan, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The episodic nature of the music – with male and female voices delivering a libretto that became abstracted because of the displacement of the narrative – created a sense that the man and woman dancing were motivated by impulses they did not comprehend while enacting rituals whose origins had been lost. But certainly, the two figures in the dance are driven by all the magnetism, vagaries, and intensity of love and lust.

Within a year of its premier, and before I had seen the work in performance, Doug contacted me to say that he had a dance that I should learn. The staging was undertaken by Gwen Welliver and Larry Hahn, members of Doug Varone and Dancers who had both been involved in the creation. Though I was preparing to perform with Doug, Larry was my partner throughout the rehearsal process, and Doug and I had only danced the work together twice prior to the opening night of my April 1999 Toronto season. Doug is an electrifying performer and being on stage with him in this magnificent work is one of the most profound experiences of my dance life. Every aspect of this work aligns with the highly distinctive aesthetic established by the choreography. Doug had envisioned the lighting, (realized by David Ferri), and it was both stunningly beautiful and devilishly tricky to dance in. Lynn Steincamp’s costumes were simple  and perfect – square cut, but in flowing fabrics that revealed the body.

Doug joined me for performances at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2001 and in 2006 the magnificent Larry Hahn and I did a five-city Canadian tour.

Oh, how I LOVE this dance! Doug is a master choreographer; his signature as a creator is unique and indelible. Eventually, my repertoire included five Varone duets: The Volpe Sisters, In Thine Eyes, Home, Heaven and armour. Each of them is a jewel.” PB

"This is dance at its very best, performed by two consummate artists, using the language of movement to trigger an emotional recognition that words could never achieve." Michael Crabb, The National Post

Listen to Richard Burton recite John Donne’s poem The Good Morrow, from which the title of this dance is sourced, here on Youtube.

White Oak and the Great White North - 1990

/

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.