Night Garden (2012)

/

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.

armour (2007/2010)

/

The final piece in Peggy’s watershed program Confluence at Harbourfront Centre in 2010 was a reworking of a Doug Varone piece, his fourth to be acquired for the company’s repertoire. Peggy writes:

In 2007 I was included in the cast of a full evening work with Doug Varone and Dancers titled Dense Terrain. This was a hugely ambitious project including 12 performers, projections, sets, and original music by Nathan Larson. One of the early influences on the work was The Lives of a Cell, a book by Louis Thomas published in 1974, and read by both Doug and I – and so many others of our generation – at the time. Many of the essays in this book focused on social insects, and a fascinating duet in Dense Terrain for Natalie Desch and Daniel Charon held a strong imprint of that source material.

I totally loved that duet! And I no longer remember if I asked Doug if I could learn it, or if he suggested it himself, but certainly it was beautifully aligned with my dances inspired by Sylvia Safdie’s films of insects, and by bringing it together with my solo earthling and the trio coalesce, it created a wonderful program. Taking the duet outside the context of Dense Terrain, Doug allowed me to commission sound design by Debashis Sinha (who had also scored earthling and coalesce) and titled this version of his dance armour.

Deb’s score supported every aspect of the dance, enriching the impact and significance of each action, while Marc Parent’s exquisite lighting required Larry and I to be spatially exacting with every single move.  

Visual artist Brian Kelley sketched, and later completed with water colour, a beautiful series of small works capturing this brief and perfect dance. 

“It is the being touched that counts, rather than the touching.” Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

“Baker and Hahn are here more like archetypes, elemental and distilled representations of the human need for connection beyond the stereotypical, emotionally overcharged and romantic dance duets we’re used to seeing. They insinuate themselves into each other’s embrace, isolated yet together, driven by forces more mysterious than they can apprehend.” - Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

“…as Mr. Sinha’s music slowly built what emerged was an intimate, human portrait. Remaining on the floor the dancers cycled through interlocking embraces. Their bodies fit like an endlessly mutable jigsaw puzzle: a universe of two.” Julia Cervantes, The New York Times

Heaven (2003)

/

This week we continue to look at a rich period before and after the turn of the millennium, during which Peggy worked with master choreographers from across Canada and the USA. We’ve arrived at the creation of Heaven for Peggy and pianist Andrew Burashko by award-winning NYC-based choreographer, Doug Varone.

Peggy writes: In 2003 Doug Varone brought together a quartet of dancers for a concert at Jacob’s Pillow titled Short Fictions. Esteemed Limon dancer Nina Watt, Varone Co. veteran Larry Hahn, and I were all in our fifties – with Doug not far behind – all of us baby-boom dance-boomers crossing a fifth decade threshold that had been extraordinarily rare in the previous generation. The program opened with Four Piano Pieces, the first three all Varone masterworks – Nocturn (Chopin), Aperture (Schubert), and Short Story (Rachmaninoff) and it closed with a new work for me with pianist Gabriela Imreh, Heaven, to Cesar Franck’s Prelude, Fugue and Variations.

Heaven is kind of memory play in which the pianist and the dancer each seem to be alone remembering the other. I push against the piano, lean into it and stroke its surfaces. At one point I withdraw the stick holding the piano’s lid open and it slams closed. I sit on the bench back-to-back with the pianist; take their shoulders in my hands and move them; touch their head; lift their hands from keyboard; and even play some of the notes myself. The disruptions to her physical rapport with the piano were, understandably, unsettling to Gabriela, and the tensions provoked became central to the experience of the performance and to the images and associations that arose for the audience.

From the outset, Heaven was intended for my own repertoire, and Doug created it with Andrew Burashko and I.  I remember us working in a New York studio with Andrew playing an upright piano with a table set against the side edge of the keyboard so that I could approximate movements against, along, and over it. Andrew was not thrown off at all by the extent and frequency with which the choreography implicated him. The one exception was when I played notes of the music, and due to his precise ear, my touch and timing required on-going coaching.

This work, with its evocations of absence and longing arising from music, holds in it the essence of my experience now, in hearing the music I once lived in as a dancer. - PB

For Facebook people, watch the performance of Heaven in full here on the Art of Time Ensemble Page.

Doug Varone’s Aperture can be seen on Youtube here and Short Story can be viewed here.

Home (1988, acquired in 2000)

/

This week we look at another landmark work by American choreographer Doug Varone, the duet Home. Peggy writes:

I no longer remember if Doug Varone suggested the duet Home to me, or if I asked him about the possibility, but certainly by the time I learned it in 2000 I had seen it performed many times and admired it unreservedly. Home brings us into a domestic space shared by a couple, into the interior lives of each of them, and into the complexity of their faltering relationship. Doug scrupulously avoided dance movement within the choreography, instead mining the qualitative nuance of gesture, timing and proximity. The superb music for Home was composed by Dick Connette, a person dear to me as someone closely linked to my personal life in New York throughout the 1980s. The incredible resonance between the music and the choreography achieves a kind of perfection that has made this work timeless. Home is a touchstone in Doug’s repertoire; it is absolutely foundational to his body of work.

I have been fortunate to perform this superb duet many times over 20+ years, including the debut for my company shared with James Kudelka, whose tenderness and humility touched me very deeply; unforgettable performances with Doug at American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival; and most frequently with Larry Hahn, whose extraordinary gifts as a performer were honed through his long tenure with Doug Varone and Dancers. PB

Doug adds: There are few works in my repertory as cherished as Home, partly due to the timing of its creation early in my career. The exploration was to craft a simple, unadorned narrative work that employed very little discernible dance vocabulary, embracing only a human everyday quality of movement. This was essential to my trajectory as an artist and the dances that have spilled out of my brain since. I’ve often called the work a theater scene set to music and as the dance has matured with time, I have continued to strip away any further artifice from the choreography. This process began 12 years after the dance was originally made when Peggy acquired the work, and followed discussions we had about pairing it down further to reveal a physical truth that felt authentic to our age as performers. We explored time and gesture with a radically different approach, allowing for the subtlest of movements to speak volumes in ways they hadn’t before. It was a turning point for the dance and perhaps myself as an artist, to understand the great value of re-evaluation. This was not only true of the physical acts that drive the work, but also of the narrative itself to be more truthful and equal in its character’s journeys. Peggy brought a new depth to the work and in doing so asked essential questions of its integrity. That affect has been lasting in a work that has stood the test of time. 

 

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.