In Thine Eyes (1996, acquired 1999)

/

This week we are looking at an exceptional work from acclaimed choreographer Doug Varone, Peggy’s fellow performer from her years with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. Doug left Lar’s company in 1986 and was soon at the helm of his own, Doug Varone and Dancers, based in New York.

“In 1996 Doug organized his company as male/female couples and, shifting the primary cast with every rehearsal day, created a duet titled In Thine Eyes. The highly stylized movement he invented called on the dancers to move in stop-action, so that each moment in the choreography created a tableau. He arranged the space geometrically, with the dancers moving along strictly delineated pathways, corridors that eventually brought them together, throwing them directly into one another’s spheres and – with all the frission of a chemical reaction – into a highly stylised series of discrete choreographic episodes.  Doug had chosen as music, a selection of tracks from Michael Nyman’s Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, originally composed for an opera-ballet, La Princesse de Milan, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The episodic nature of the music – with male and female voices delivering a libretto that became abstracted because of the displacement of the narrative – created a sense that the man and woman dancing were motivated by impulses they did not comprehend while enacting rituals whose origins had been lost. But certainly, the two figures in the dance are driven by all the magnetism, vagaries, and intensity of love and lust.

Within a year of its premier, and before I had seen the work in performance, Doug contacted me to say that he had a dance that I should learn. The staging was undertaken by Gwen Welliver and Larry Hahn, members of Doug Varone and Dancers who had both been involved in the creation. Though I was preparing to perform with Doug, Larry was my partner throughout the rehearsal process, and Doug and I had only danced the work together twice prior to the opening night of my April 1999 Toronto season. Doug is an electrifying performer and being on stage with him in this magnificent work is one of the most profound experiences of my dance life. Every aspect of this work aligns with the highly distinctive aesthetic established by the choreography. Doug had envisioned the lighting, (realized by David Ferri), and it was both stunningly beautiful and devilishly tricky to dance in. Lynn Steincamp’s costumes were simple  and perfect – square cut, but in flowing fabrics that revealed the body.

Doug joined me for performances at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2001 and in 2006 the magnificent Larry Hahn and I did a five-city Canadian tour.

Oh, how I LOVE this dance! Doug is a master choreographer; his signature as a creator is unique and indelible. Eventually, my repertoire included five Varone duets: The Volpe Sisters, In Thine Eyes, Home, Heaven and armour. Each of them is a jewel.” PB

"This is dance at its very best, performed by two consummate artists, using the language of movement to trigger an emotional recognition that words could never achieve." Michael Crabb, The National Post

Listen to Richard Burton recite John Donne’s poem The Good Morrow, from which the title of this dance is sourced, here on Youtube.

Person Project (1991)

/

This week we arrive at the last in a series of works that Peggy commissioned from esteemed choreographers in the early days of her solo company. Person Project was created for Peggy by NYC dancer and choreographer, Tere O’Connor.

“I first saw Tere O’Connor in a concert of Rosalind Newman’s work at Movement Research in lower Manhattan. The dancers were wearing practice clothes and Tere had on a kind of loose knitted shirt with sleeves that fluttered a few inches below his fingertips. His dancing was precise and delicate, organized according to an inscrutable logic. His gaze was cast downward, or perhaps inward, and I could not take my eyes off him.

At Danspace I encountered him in his own work – the duet Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby with Nancy Coenen – and was thunderstruck by his images and by the thud of realization that dropped for me. Tere also saw me perform (he sited Lar Lubovitch’s Exultate Jubilate) and one day he waited for me after a class I was teaching, introduced himself, and asked if I would dance for him in a quartet project, The Organization of Sadness. With hindsight, I understand how the androgyny of my body and my lack of femininity as a dancer made me a good choice in terms of supporting an underlying premise in his work — the disruption of expectation for conformity around gender expression.

Tere made Person Project for me in 1991. At Unique Clothing on lower Broadway I tried on a succession of vintage dresses, and Tere and Nancy chose a red velvet party dress lined with stiffening buckram. The bodice was hard and flat and the skirt made a tremendous whap folding in on itself with every spin. Person Project is 20 minutes long and performed in silence until the very end, so the dress provided a kind of percussive accompaniment. I made very detailed notes on the inner workings of the dance that tracked the shift of states and emotions in order to keep the momentum of the dance moving forward without the markers of a soundtrack to navigate the way.

Tere is an absolute iconoclast in an art form in which an alignment with trends in form and content often determine success. Working within the medium of choreography he also pushes against it. His dances involve precise imagery and motions, but they are also a working-out-of-things through investigation, accident, self-correction, and erasure. I count myself extraordinarily fortunate to have worked with him.” PB

Tere writes about this time in the early 90s: “I was a young artist when I met Peggy Baker and asked her to dance in my work. I remember being gobsmacked the first time I saw her dance. I then got to meet this unique creature who was an icon for me, but also very available and most importantly, thoughtful. The work I asked her to be a part of was only the second dance I had made with other performers in it! I did not know what I was doing yet as a choreographer. I knew what I was attempting to move away from and I knew that I was in a state of experimentation; not looking for manifestoes, or aesthetic proclamations, just a way to work that included my intuition about the form. I was in this process of questioning dance. Peggy entered that realm unflinchingly, like an open book. She graced The Organization of Sadness with her presence and placed trust in me.  She put her incredible body and mind to work right next to my queries and it was a joy.  This early support from such an intelligent, venerated dance artist contributed greatly to my confidence in choosing more anomalous pathways as I forged my choreographic imprint. 

One does not arrive at any substantive knowledge before working for a good while, and I was in a process of parsing out assumptions around gender, virtuosity, musicality and presence in dance, seeking to individuate beyond the default settings of western dance history. I was looking for an expressive vehicle for the capaciousness of persona and an internal life. Choreography seemed to be a perfect container for the ever-changing dynamics of consciousness. As a queer artist, I had understood early on that the facade of a person and their internal world are rarely indicators of each other. So much of what is roiling underneath is held hostage by the requirements of facing other humans.

When I created Person Project for Peggy, I wanted to start by finding a generic human presence and then build a person and an internal world with great variations. I did not, however, want it to etch a visual mark on the surface of the work. Perhaps inspired by performers like Liv Ullman or Isabelle Adjani, two extraordinarily subtle actresses of the day, I felt Peggy’s uncanny ability to electrify her dancing with emotionality was a perfect building block. She successfully avoided the all-purpose, melodramatic grimace, so common in dancers at that time, to create an internalized performance with compelling contrasts of emotion. The being who inhabits this dance engenders great tenderness. It is a person who is perhaps driven by unnamed emotional territories. Her masterful performance was so subtle, and so deeply poignant.

Peggy Baker’s magnanimous presence in my life helped launch me into an unapologetic exploratory process that has not left me to this day. Her early support for my work holds inestimable value as an initial generator for my career, one blessed  by other such benevolent people along the way. I am so grateful to Peggy Baker and so astounded at everything she has accomplished as an artist–and a person.“ TO

"You can sense the compulsive quality of the movement - the pushing, pulling, opening and shutting of the body (and spirit); the effort and concentration required to set its directions." - Alina Gildner, The Globe and Mail

For more information about Tere O’Connor’s and the theme of ambiguity in his work, visit Classical Voice here.
For a fun look at the history of the vintage clothing scene in New York, visit racked.com here.

White Oak and the Great White North - 1990

/

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.