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.

Night Garden (2012)

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By 2012 Peggy was well and truly bitten by the Nuit Blanche bug, and set out to create her third installation for Toronto’s all-night celebration of contemporary art. She writes:

The Betty Oliphant Theatre at Canada’s National Ballet School is a big, square auditorium fronted by the façade of a Victorian house that was designed by Jack Diamond. Seating for an audience of 260 rises for 8 rows from the main floor with a large balcony and box seating on both sides above. Surprisingly, the 8 wide rows of upholstered seats may be accordioned back to fit under the balcony, revealing an expansive floor directly in front of the stage.

Wanting to do something special and unexpected for Nuit Blanche, I was extremely excited about staging a work that could proceed with interruption for a full 12 hours on the house floor of the theatre, with the audience watching from above on three sides and coming and going freely throughout the duration of the work. To add to the surreal beauty of this overhead view, Larry Hahn created a set of 12 standing lamps – each with an undulating silver stalk crowned with a glowing white cone – that were arranged in clusters throughout the space. 

Sourcing and then reworking foundational material from coalesce and Piano/Quartet, I developed a 20-minute choreography to be performed successively by four different casts, and with each cycle overlapping in the last few minutes as the work was passed on to the next trio. The extraordinary dancers for this project were Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Kate Holden, Benjamin Kamino, Megumi Kokuba, Amanda LaRusic, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, Jessica Runge, Stephanie Tremblay Abubo, and Natalie Westerbeek. The dancers’ black sequined costumes – each one unique and artfully crafted by Jennifer Dallas – glinted in the glowing lamplight, while a gentle, shimmering score by Debashis Sinha resonated throughout the space.

The emotional potency of this durational dance worked on me more and more deeply as the night progressed, and when the final cycle was completed and the space was left empty, and then quiet, and then dark, I was overwhelmed by the feelings of profound grief I had been carrying for the 20 months since the death of my husband.

coalesce (2010)

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coalesce is Peggy’s first ensemble work to be included in her company’s main stage programming. It premiered in Toronto in a concert titled Confluence, presented at EnWave - now Harbourfront Centre Theatre.

Peggy writes: After 20 years of making solos for myself, I was extremely curious about what might happen if I engaged in a creative process with a small group of dancers. I thought that a trio would be within reach for me and brought together as the cast three dancers I deeply admired – Kate Holden, Sean Ling and Sahara Morimoto. I had used one of Sylvia Safdie’s films as a foundational resource for my solo earthling, but there were several others of two insects together and of whole groups of insects that were also fascinating, so I started there.

The dancers and I dug in to learning about communication among insects via pheromones, and played with movement patterns inspired by the many insect appendages including 3 sets of limbs, antennae, wings and mandibles. A very particular sensibility arose by shifting concepts around sensory discernment and by working with the idea of an exoskeleton – a hard, brittle exterior. The trio that arose was highly stylized and absolutely fascinating to watch.

Debashis Sinha was present in the studio with us, sitting at his computer and wearing a set of headphones so that he could develop the sound design parallel to the emergence of the choreography. It did take me some time to land on the proper costuming, but in staging an excerpt of coalesce for the graduating class at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Jennifer Dallas created a fantastic set of costumes and I turned to her to make a new set for my company using the same design.

I took intense pleasure in creating this dance with Kate, Sean, Sahara, and in the new ways of working that arose with Deb and with lighting designer Marc Parent. I knew without a doubt that I had found a way forward beyond making and performing solos, and I moved eagerly into a new phase in my dance life. PB

“Baker's new program indeed transports us to an otherworldly place beyond conventional human experience.” Read more from Michael Crabb’s review in The Toronto Star

The dancer and the insect expert is an article about the involvement of Dr. Darryl Gywnne, a behavioural ecologist and professor of biology at U of T Mississauga in Peggy’s presentaton of Confluence.

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.