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.

Brahms Waltzes (1992)

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This week we arrive in 1992 and look at Peggy’s third major solo created on and for herself, the timeless Brahms Waltzes:

“An invitation to bring a solo program to Peterborough through Public Energy Performing Arts came with some commissioning money for a new work, so Brahms Waltzes marks the very first work of mine to garner to an investment in my choreographic development by a presenter – trailblazing contemporary dance champion, Bill Kimball.

Although having a pianist perform with me for the premiere far exceeded the scope of the budget for this run with Bill, the choice of an early work for piano by Johannes Brahms was certainly inspired by the possibility of having Andrew Burashko perform with me at some point in the future.

Annabelle Gamson had taught me Isadora Duncan’s dances to the same series of waltzes, and I curious to see how I might respond to the music myself. As I developed the choreography I could feel myself weighing the many influences on my dancing and asking myself what to let of go, what to go beyond, what to get deeper inside. I think I kept coming back to this dance as a kind of touchstone because it holds that time of transition so transparently.

Brahms Waltzes rides the uncomplicated joys of the music, but it also holds two central metaphors: sleep as an integrating force during a time of personal change and growth, and the demarcation of a new period in one’s life as the crossing of a threshold.” PB

"Mixes graceful lyricism with an economy of gesture and even moments of complete stillness in a solo that spans explosions of power with almost meditative serenity.” - Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

Peggy gifted this work to Kate Holden and Jessica Runge as part of Year One of her Choreographer’s Trust project. Find out more about The Choreographer’s Trust here, and read about Kate’s reinterpretation of this piece as this body of memory / Brahms Waltzes in The Toronto Star here.

To read more about sleep as a metaphor in art and dance, read this article in The Huffington Post.