Heaven (2003)

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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.

Accident (1989)

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This week we look back at Peggy’s mentorship and work with American dancer and choreographer, Annabelle Gamson.

“More than any other artist in the mid-1970s, Annabelle Gamson initiated unprecedented attention to the history of American modern dance. Her musically inspired, passionate performances of dances, choreographed by Isadora Duncan and others in the early twentieth century, brought about a resurgence of interest in Duncan’s work and her legacy, modern dance. Although Gamson was in her forties when she began performing Duncan’s dances, the dynamic strength and maturity of her physical presence, crowned by a mane of long white hair, distinguished her as singularly original.” The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women

Peggy writes: “In my late thirties, eager to learn more about solo dancing, I sought out Annabelle as a mentor. She allowed me to take her classes alongside the extraordinary women in her group (including Roxane D’Orleans-Juste, Risa Steinberg and Nina Watt – all soloists with the Limon Company), and to understudy the historic works she was currently staging as well as the new group work she was creating. As a culmination of our work together, Annabelle choreographed two solos for me, Accident (1989) and Sand (1990).

Though she was working with her group mainly at the 92nd St Y in New York City, Annabelle was living outside the city, in Rye Brook, and all of our rehearsals took place in her home studio – an expansive space with a beautiful hardwood floor and wide windows, furnished only with a grand piano. For the weeks that we worked together I took morning class in the city, caught a train at Grand Central, was picked up at the station by Annabelle, and then rehearsed with her for 2 or 3 hours. Annabelle always insisted on giving me dinner before I left, and conversations over those meals were the occasion for stories about her childhood dance lessons, about Agnes de Mille and Anna Sokolow, about dancing on Broadway and with American Ballet Theatre, and about the interior world of the Isadora’s dances.

Accident was made in the wake of the death of a young woman – the child of one of Annabelle’s friends – in a car crash. It was a tragic dance, with sequences of jarringly brutal action, the body a distorted tangle. One day in rehearsal the images at play brought me to tears. Annabelle was shocked. “What ‘s wrong with you?” she demanded, “This isn’t happening to you, you’re telling the story.” Without that blunt intervention, some of the dances that lay ahead for me over the next decades could never have been navigated safely.” - PB

“Ms. Baker is a performer with a shining, expressive innocence and a body that is an astonishing collection of big bones and lithe muscles. Annabelle Gamson made inspired use of all that in ''Accident,'' set to a dark score by Francis Poulenc, in which a life seems to be relived in the moments right after an accident.” Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

Read more about Annabelle Gamson’s Isadora Duncan reconstruction project here on The New York Times.

Listen to dance legends discuss the home created for modern dance by the 92nd Street Y here.