Her Heart (1992-93)

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This week Peggy looks back at a work that is very close to her, inspired by her mother, Rean Smith:

From 1991 to 1994 I was director of the summer dance program at Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain, and I often stayed on in Vancouver to teach for EDAM at the Western Front. Peter Bingham had picked up the reins of EDAM as Artistic Director in 1989, (it had been a collective that included my husband Ahmed Hassan up to that point), and during those Vancouver teaching stints Ahmed and Peter and I spent a huge amount of time together – sharing meals, discussing art and politics, listening to music. One evening Peter put on a record of late piano music by Johannes Brahms and the Opus 117 and 118 Preludes immediately suffused me in waves of memory connected to my mother.

In 1992, I was invited to create a work for Joysanne Sidimus and Susan Macpherson for a gala in support of the Dancer Transtion Resource Centre, and I took this as an opportunity to work with Opus 117 No. 1. As I made this duet I held the image of my mother at her age at that time, 64. My mother was just 24 when I was born, and other of the preludes captured vivid memories of her in her thirties (Opus 118 No. 2), forties (Opus 117 No. 2) and fifties (Opus 117 No. 3). In 1993, I distilled the duet into a solo and brought it together with the other preludes in a work I titled Her Heart.

My mother died in 2018, a few months before her ninetieth birthday, and only a matter of weeks before a concert in Toronto for which the superb dancer Jessica Runge would perform Her Heart. The great Brahms interpreter Peter Longworth was to have performed with Jessica, but he went into the hospital just days before the opening and tragically died soon afterward at the age 53. With just three days to prepare, pianist Cheryl Duvall stepped forward to play the Brahms in a series of performances that held love and longing and a profound sense of loss. - PB

"A rhapsodic memory dance addressing themes of the aging woman." Elissa Barnard / Chronicle Herald / Halifax

For an introduction to the music of Brahms visit The Guardian 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.