Aleatoric Solo No. 2 (2016)

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This week we reach the final piece in Peggy’s Aleatoric series, instigated way back in 2010 with the original Aleatoria installation created for Nuit Blanche. Peggy writes about this final work in the series:

In 2015, I made an unforgettable trip to Japan with the dancer Sahara Morimoto, who was at that time the Artistic Associate with my company. We had been invited by Helen Price to teach a week-long workshop for the Yokohama Ballet Academy, and we made it the centrepiece of a 3-week adventure that began in Kyoto and finished in Tokyo. At the Yokohama Museum of Art, we saw a spectacular retrospective exhibition of work by Takashi Ishida, and I was especially struck by a massive canvas that stood tipped up on its corner in the centre of a gallery. This canvas had been painted on over and over again in successive iterations. It had been gashed. It had light projecting onto it. It was an object, and an artifact of its making. It also presented an environment into which one entered. It was a performance. 

The memory of my encounter with Ishida’s installation continued to work on me, and at some point I imagined the blank canvas with which he had begun. I thought about myself beginning a new work and my sense that I can never begin with a blank slate, an empty canvas, a tabula rasa. Rather, I have a sense that my fallibility, my flaws and inadequacies, the complexities of my history as both a person and an artist, mean that the “canvas” upon which I am working is already marred, marked, damaged. And so I took this idea of a “damaged canvas” as the central metaphor for my final aleatoric dance, a solo for the magnificent Kate Holden.

With a huge unpainted canvas ripped open with a long slash and tipped on its corner centre stage, Kate inhabited a world of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, within which she embodied prowess, vulnerability, fear, elation, fatigue, angst, and courage.

Her heroic solo – hugely demanding physically and vocally – closed the four-part program Phase Space. Composing each of those works was deeply fascinating for me as a choreographer, but my ambition with them was to create dances that possessed striking and unique identities that transcended the methods, mechanics, and mysteries of making them. The iconic American choreographer Merce Cunningham spoke eloquently on this point in relation to his own work: “Even with all this preparation, however complex it is, if it doesn’t become dance, then it’s meaningless.”

The concert in which this work featured, Phase Space, was honoured with a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Sound Design for John Kameel Farah and Fides Krucker.

Aleatoric Trio No. 1 (2016)

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Preparing for a concert in 2016 she titled Phase Space, Peggy created the first (and only) trio in her Aleatoric series. She writes:

I remained fascinated by the richness of developing dances as part of the aleatoric series (in which I had the dancers call up remembered movements from past works and then explored their potency within a new choreographic framework), and during the research for locus plot I encountered the concept of “phase space” which provided a powerful and stimulating new model for working in this way.

In physics, “phase space” is a term used to describe a disruption of time and space in which the laws of dimensional continuity and evenly paced, sequential time no longer hold true. Phase space can be transformed like working bread dough by stretching, flattening, folding, rolling, punching, and shaping so that the original relationship between any two points in time and space shift in radical and unpredictable ways.

I think of memory as functioning along the same lines as phase space. Certainly, it is a realm that exists outside of the usual conventions of spatial boundaries and linear sequencing. Memory unravels, floats, dissolves, reverses, contracts, expands, and spirals. In my experience, memory has more in common with dreams, fantasy, poetry, music, literature, and painting, than with the chronological experience we expect it to capture.  A memory can languish in the constant flux of reinterpretation or become a narrative so polished it takes on the shining luster of a brittle shell. 

Working with Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, and Sahara Morimoto, I reconfigured the movement vocabulary they each brought forward as memories through the use of compositional structures, textures, energies, and themes that I pursued; by disrupting the space with a group of chairs (including two that were child sized) plundered from The Transparent Recital; by the integration of a demanding and far-ranging vocal score by Fides Krucker; and finally by situating musician John Kameel Farah on a ledge about 12 feet up on the back wall of the stage where he could look down to improvise an electronic score according to an open and spontaneous reading of his bird’s eye view of the performance.

Together, these contributions seeded a dreamscape unfolding within a shifting landscape of chairs, and revealing impulses, images, and oblique storylines that emerged from beneath the surface of the steps, amplified by voice, light and electronic sound. Reminiscing about this trio six years later, Sarah Fregeau said, “I loved that piece. All those chairs that were growled at and sung to.”

Aleatoric Trio No. 1 premiered as the opening work in a four-part program titled Phase Space, that also included Aleatoric Solo No. 1 for Sahara Morimoto, Aleatoric Duet No. 2 for Andrea Nann and Sean Ling, and the brand new Aleatoric Solo No. 2 for Kate Holden.

a true story (1997)

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This week’s blog post looks at the first dance story that Peggy created. It foreshadows a deep interest in drama, text, and vocalization that she will explore in the coming years, working with artists such as Sarah Chase, Denise Clarke, Michael Healey, and Fides Krucker.

“An invitation to perform at a fundraiser for the December 6 Fund demanded some deep thinking about how to contribute something relevant as a dancer. The Fund provides interest-free loans to women in the Toronto area working to extricate themselves from violent relationships, and their May 1997 event was titled Reclaiming Mother’s Day: A Critical Celebration of Motherhood.

When Ahmed Hassan and I married in 1990, I joined the household he shared with his 13-year-old daughter, for whom he had sole custody, and so became her stepmother. “Stepmother” – what a loaded word. So harsh and intrusive sounding, so laden with negative connotations. I developed a true story, a text and movement piece that unpacked my struggle with that word and with its eventual replacement by a word coined by the young child of a close friend.

For that first performance, I wore street clothes, including my Blundstones, standing at a microphone on the small stage at Trinity St Paul’s United Church. The program was extremely moving and included a performance by Tafelmusik and spoken contributions by actors Shirley Douglas, Linda Griffiths, and Elizabeth Sheppard; writers Irshad Manji, Susan Swan, and Stevie Cameron; politician Olivia Chow; and comedians Diane Flacks and Sandra Shamas. Diane Flacks followed me on the program and when she approached the mic imitating my walk before turning to me with a huge beaming smile I flushed red and felt my heart race at the thrilling embarrassment.

I found it incredibly potent to speak while dancing, and the piece landed for me with a tremendous resonance. I went on the perform a true story many times over the next 20 years.” PB

“Ms. Baker, a Canadian whose superlative dancing and clever choreography are well known in New York, started off with a true story. Her initial stamps, violent torso rotations and emphatic arm folding seemed like pure dance. Suddenly the gestures were imbued with dramatic meaning and illustrations of words spoken by the dancer.” Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times

To watch the parentally-themed comedy stylings of Diane Flacks, visit YouTube.com here.

Geometry of the Circle (1993)

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Now well into the third year of Peggy Baker | Solo Dance, Peggy is generating much of the new work herself, collaborating largely with Toronto-based musicians and composers. This early period of her work as a choreographer established live music as a distinguishing feature, with the musician not present as an unseen accompanist, but as an equal performance partner alongside her onstage.

“For this second work together, Ahmed Hassan and I started by reversing the rules we’d established for Sanctum, in which we were set far apart, each confined to our own small rectangle of space, and for which Ahmed’s music was comprised purely of percussive sound. For this new work, we had sculptor Janet Morton create a set of three objects to define the circumference of a circle, and Ahmed and I discovered and pursued one another within this miniaturized world. We thought of ourselves as entities with distinctly different modes of expression and communication: Ahmed a creature for whom sound was primary, and me a creature of gesture and action. Wearing a wireless mic, Ahmed careened about the space in his manual wheelchair while I bounded and scampered away from him and toward him, finally meeting face to face, stepping inside the footrests of his chair, grasping him by the shoulders, and lowering myself to squat back on my heels while we met eyes and he “sang” to me.

An invitation to revive Geometry of the Circle for performances as part of the cultural celebrations for the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver led to a decade of rich collaboration with the vocalist Fides Krucker. First interpreting and reconstructing Ahmed’s extraordinarily eccentric vocal score, Fides then taught it to performer Mark Brose, coaching him in the intricacies of a virtuoso performance that he shared with two exquisite dancers: Alison Denham and Sahara Morimoto.

Geometry of the Circle is as dear to me as a love letter, inscribed with the disappearing ink of live performance.” PB

"Hassan...earthbound...confined to a wheelchair... (Baker) his velvet-jointed sylph...a celebration of mutual power, and of constructive differences." - Robert Everett-Green / Globe and Mail

Read about Janet Morton knitting a cozy for an entire house on Ward’s Island here on Torontosavvy.com. For a more academic analysis of Janet’s work, read Emily Jane Rothwell’s Master’s Thesis here.