Unfold (2000)

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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.

Why the Brook Wept (1996)

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As Peggy Baker and Andrew Burashko continue developing their repertoire together, Andrew suggests another John Cage score, Ophelia, composed for the American dancer Jean Erdman in 1946. Peggy writes about her response:

“That the music had been written explicitly for a choreographic portrait of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet was both compelling and intimidating, and I hesitated to take it on. But the more I listened to the music, the more amazed and fascinated I was by the ways in which it captured Ophelia’s dilemma. Finally, I could not turn away.

To begin with, I worked strictly with the script of the play developing sequences, scenes and images based on the text. Once I had worked my way through the words I went back to the music, allowing the score to guide me in arranging, distilling, and refining the choreography. Also very much on my mind was the John Everett Millais painting Ophelia, (1851-2), which I had seen at the Tate in London many years earlier. I chose not to research the original choreography, so there are no intentional allusions to Erdman’s dance in my own. The description of Ophelia’s death as a fall “into a weeping brook” inspired my title.

One of the most potent images the music inspired for me was the idea of the pianist as Hamlet, and his performance of the score as his own wrenching self-interrogation. So the piano is positioned in profile on stage left, with the pianist’s back is to the dancer. At the end of the piece, the dancer is left on the floor, crumpled against the back legs of the piano bench, and once the final notes have decayed, the pianist closes the keyboard, stands and closes the piano’s lid and exists the stage. Whenever we performed this work, it closed the program, including on Art of Time Ensemble’s program, If music be… first staged in 2010.” PB

“The two dance sequences are beautifully rendered: Tanya Howard and Patrick Lavoie, as choreographed by James Kudelka in the Act III scene where Romeo and Juliet part after a night of lovemaking; and the remarkable Peggy Baker dancing Ophelia’s madness to music of John Cage to close the show.”
- John Terauds, The Toronto Star

"Cage composed the music for a 1946 dance by Jean Erdman, but Baker has made it her own, as much acted as danced.  She passes through a full spectrum of moods, from languor to frenzy.  When Burashko closes the piano and leaves her fallen figure on the stage, it is the spirit leaving the body." 
- Susan Walker, The Toronto Star

To learn more about the work of John Cage watch John Cage. From Zero here on Youtube.

This Isn't The End (1991)

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The second commissioned work from James Kudelka in Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ repertoire, This Isn’t The End has a decidedly kooky edge to it. Explaining the method to his madness, James writes:

”When Peggy asked me to help oversee an evening at the PDT* that would include Romeo and Juliet Before Parting I thought it was important that the program include something with whimsy. For me, contemporary dance programs always had a tendency to take themselves very seriously. Creating something lighter and whimsical would be a challenge for us both.

The score of This Isn’t the End was created by John Oswald who wrote three pieces based on re-edits of readings of Agatha Christie mystery novel talking books - a garbled recreation of a few murder scenarios. And I asked Peggy to play the role of an old fashioned nurse, in white lab coat and striped hat. Peggy collected some wonderful props to go with that, and Marc Parent lit the stage with exposed fluorescent institutional lighting. The dance was unusual and surprising and answered the call for some lightness, and mystery - and accessibility - but it was also a little insane.” JK

Peggy adds: “Thinking back on This Isn’t the End, what really stands out is the joy of the rehearsals, all of the laughter James and I shared. I was wearing the costume with all of its many pieces early on in rehearsals — lingerie, white stockings, zip-front nurse’s uniform, snap-closure lab coat, lace-up shoes, fold-and-button nurse’s cap — and we laughed over the comparison to Jean-Pierre Perrault’s dancers, wearing their shirts, suits and ties, coats, hats and boots in rehearsal for JOE. We were the ridiculous to their sublime!

In addition to the elaborate costume there were props galore, each used in a multitude of ways — a watch, a pen, latex gloves, a surgical mask, a stethoscope, a huge syringe, a condom I inflated and sent aloft… and in a nod to Mark Morris’s Ten Suggestions, (which also had many props to manipulate) James once referred to This Isn’t the End as One Hundred and Ten Suggestions.

James also made one of these Agatha Christie mystery dances for Patricia Fraser, and though our solos were never danced on the same program, she does leave her shoes behind her when she exits the stage at the end of her solo, and there is a (mysterious) pair of shoes onstage when my solo begins.” PB

A case for Miss Marple indeed.

For more information about composer John Oswald’s plunderphonic sampling style (and to see what websites used to look like in the olden days) visit plunderphonics.com.

* Premiere Dance Theatre, now the Fleck Theatre at Harbourfront.

White Oak and the Great White North - 1990

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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.

Romeo and Juliet Before Parting (1989)

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James Kudelka has choreographed for many of the world’s leading ballet companies, as well as for smaller contemporary companies and ensembles. This week, Peggy reflects on her first work with him:

“James has been a hugely important presence in my life, and I was fortunate enough to work with him as a dancer on four very different works. The first, Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, was at his invitation and the others were commissioned by me: This Isn’t the End (1991), Pelléas et Mélisande (1997), and A Woman by a Man (2008). The first and last of these dances are duets, and they stand as the only male/female duets concerning relationship ever choreographed for me.

It was always thrilling to be in rehearsal with James – he works extremely quickly and likes to see the dancer working at the brink of their ability. For Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, Sylvain Lafortune and I were in almost constant contact, negotiating a succession of complicated lifts, precarious counterbalances and intricately interlocking actions. The complexity of the partnering was way beyond me, but between them, James and Sylvain were somehow able to teach me everything I needed to enter into the fray and reach the heart of the dance.”

James writes about this piece: “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting was initially commissioned for a film, Romeos and Juliets, produced by Rhombus Media. It was choreographed at the Montreal Danse studio on Rue St. André, and we used Paul-André Fortier’s table from his work Tell for the bed. Peggy was staying at my condo in Old Montreal with me, and Sylvain was at that point no longer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. It is remarkable that this dance lived on and found a usefulness for Peggy in her stage performances but also danced by new casts. Remarkably I think each new cast is still wearing the costume that Peggy purchased for herself in the ladies lingerie department at The Bay.

I wanted to begin the duet at on odd place musically. In the ballet this dance opens Act 3. There is a short overture to this act that I cut, so that the first sound we hear is the deep notes from the lower strings. Like a horrible feeling in your gut the morning after a boisterous one night stand, and the admission that life has changed and the characters have both won and are about to lose all at the same time. Love hurts.”

“On videotape, Peggy Baker is dancing a beautifully articulate Juliet to the familiar passionate violins of Prokofiev. But this Juliet is not fluttering demurely on her toes--she is barefoot, with starkly cropped blond hair and a solidly weighted sense of longing. In James Kudelka’s duet, “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting,” Baker strikes an exceptional balance between active and passive energies. Caressed and lifted by partner Sylvain Lafortune, she also makes some advances: holds him firmly, lowers him to the floor. She is the perfect postmodern romantic heroine, lyrically strong and muscularly delicate.” Jennifer Fisher, Los Angeles Times, 1996

Sylvain Lafortune was a guest faculty member at Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ August Intensive in 2018 and 2019 leading courses in Partnering. Read more about his approach here.