Aleatoric Solo No. 1 (2013)

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Building on the creation methodology she first used in Aleatoria (2010) and then again in Aleatoric Duet No. 1 (2012), Peggy embarked on a new solo with her company’s Artistic Associate and dancer, Sahara Morimoto. Peggy writes:

The excitement of mining the movement vocabulary from my growing body of work, of allowing that material to evolve outside the framework of the choreographic context for which it was initially developed, and of focusing on new compositional forms continued to inspire me as I expanded the company’s repertoire of aleatoric dances.

Of the dancers in my group, Sahara Morimoto had by far the greatest breadth of experience within the repertoire, so working on an aleatoric solo for her offered a huge amount of source material.  I invited to Sahara to choose freely from among the many dances she had inhabited, and within a just a few rehearsals we had an abundance of movement to work with. Jumping off from the double rectangles that Simon Rossiter had suggested for the duet with Nova Bhattacharya, I asked lighting designer Marc Parent to propose a frame for Sahara’s solo and he offered an elongated diamond – shallow, but wide – defined by a highly reflective mylar frame about a foot wide.

The solo began with the curtain opening on a stage being set up for the dance with improvising musician John Kameel Farah doing a sound check at a tech table on stage left, Sahara warming up in the middle of the stage, and the crew unrolling and taping down the mylar strips. Once the mylar frame was complete and the crew had exited, the first lighting cue came up and Sahara and John went directly into the performance.  The detail, physical prowess, and dynamic variation of Sahara’s dancing was phenomenal. The short black shift she wore had a beaded mesh back that glinted and glittered in light reflected off the mylar frame. Sahara’s arms and legs etched the space calligraphically and the potency and gravitas of her persona elevated every moment of the choreography. PB

Discover Peggy’s impetus for her series of aleatoric works by checking out Guelph-based artist Ben Grossman and his double CD recording, Aleatoric Duets for Electro-Acoustic Hurdy Gurdy.

Japanese dancer with chin length bob stands on her left leg while holding her right knee, caught in mid-movement.

Photo of Sahara Morimoto by John Lauener.

Aleatoric Duet No. 1 (2011)

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 Aleatoria marked the beginning of a new series of dances developed over the next five years. The first of these was Aleatoric Duet No. 1 with Nova Bhattacharya, a radiantly charismatic and hugely accomplished dance artist with a grounding in the South Asian form of Bharatanatyam.

Peggy writes: Nova and I shared an on-going exchange around solo practice, initiated in 2000 by the impact of seeing her perform her stunning solo Maskura. She commissioned Map of the Known World from me in 2002, and that same year I passed on Sanctum – an early solo of mine – to Nova with her collaborative partner, musician Ed Hanley. Invited by curator Sara Palmieri to share a concert at the Centre for the Arts at Brock University, St. Catharines, Nova and I took the opportunity to perform a duet extrapolating on the organizing principles used for Aleatoria.

Every dancer carries indelible movement memories, and the idea of mining traces of past choreography that reside in the body rather than focusing on the development of new movement material excited me as an opportunity to attend exclusively to elements of composition.  Nova focused her attention on the traces of my choreography she held, allowing those movements to change and develop outside of the original choreographic structures from which they had emerged. I dealt with assembling the movement material through rhythmic and spatial counterpoint; orchestration relative to the density of action, shifts in tempo, quality, and relationship. When lighting designer Simon Rossiter came in to watch and makes notes on the choreography, he interpreted each solo as taking place in its own clearly delineated space and made a diagram of two overlapping but offset rectangles. This interpretation – which had not occurred to me – was completely convincing and we decided to amplify this reading of the dance by marking each rectangle with a frame taped onto the floor.

Our concert opened with Maskura, followed by Krishna’s Mouth, Map of the Known World, Strand, and then Aleatoric Duet No. 1. No photographs of the duet exist, but the single shot of Nova and I together in Aleatoria at Nuit Blanche, captured by Omer Yukseker, holds an intimation our dance. And in the poetry of resonance that so often arises when different art works are brought into conversation in a gallery, a playlist, or a dance concert, the program note that Nova wrote for her opening solo reads, “Maskura is a requiem, offering the hope that what is remembered will never be lost.”

Photo of Nova Bhattacharya and Peggy Baker by Omer Yukseker.

Aleatoria (2010)

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Peggy was bitten by the Nuit Blanche bug early! After creating move in 2009, she followed up the next year with a new, all-night durational work, Aleatoria.

Peggy writes: Debashis Sinha was my Musical Director for the premiere of move at Nuit Blanche, and he had brought in some other improvising musicians who all played together, switching off as to who was leading. Phil Strong, Ben Grossman and John Gzowski joined Deb, and the shifts in the sonic environment throughout the 12 performances between 7pm and 7am offered tremendous support and stimulation to the performers.

Ben gifted each of us involved in move with his new double CD release, Aleatoric Solo Duets for Electro-Acoustic Hurdy Gurdy. The two CDs were designed to be played simultaneously with each CD player set to shuffle so that the tracks – which were varying lengths – constantly recombined. I LOVED this concept as a premise for a durational dance and immediately beginning planning for Nuit blanche 2010.

I brought together 11 dancers who had been involved in past performances of my work and asked them to call up any movement memories they carried from those dances and to use them as the basis for improvised episodes that would last 10 minutes. ‘Aleatoric’ means randomly or by chance and taking that invitation we used a chance procedure to determine the order of dancers each hour. The 12-hour performance began with a single dancer who was joined by a second dancer after 5 minutes and replaced by a third dancer at the 10-minute mark and so on and so on throughout the night. I joined Kate Alton, Nova Bhattacharya, Sylvain Brochu, Sarah Fregeau, David Houle, Sasha Ivanochko, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, Jessica Runge, and Brodie Stevenson – each of us dancing as soloists but also spontaneously creating duets with one another to Ben’s gorgeous music as it spun out over the hours.

Find out more about the hurdy gurdy here on YouTube.

Film-maker Midi Onodera captured time-lapse movies. You can watch them here on her website.

Yang (1998/2003)

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Peggy is occasionally commissioned by other artists to make works for them - including Sarah Chase (Garland, 1996), Dancemakers (for Carolyn Woods, Rocket Girl, 1999), and Nova Bhattacharya (Map of the Known World, 2000). The only commissioned work from Peggy to be bought into the Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ repertoire is Yang, made for Sylvain Brochu in 1998. Sylvain writes:

“In 1997 I was awarded a Canada Council grant to commission solos from 5 selected Canadian choreographers. I had studied with Peggy, seen her perform, and was very inspired by her commitment and artistic integrity. Even though I had never been through a creative process with her I had a strong feeling that our connection would produce a powerful piece. Peggy knew me as a dancer and set up to create a dance that would greatly challenge me technically. I distinctly remember the main creation period: I had flown to Toronto for two weeks. The process was very demanding physically, but I applied myself wholeheartedly, and with a level of trust that I had not often experienced before. Yang turned out to be one of the strongest pieces of my solo repertoire, and was the ideal finale for my solo concert. I’m grateful for the gift of this dance, which lives on through successive generations of dancers.”

Peggy adds: “Like Sylvain, I still remember the intensity of the creative process for this dance. I went in from day one with the intention of developing an action language that would provide us with a challenging and exciting encounter, as Sylvain and I are dancers with extremely different movement sensibilities. That encounter was quickly informed by the androgyny we each embody. The forceful, strident movement vocabulary we were working with shifted me more into androgyny, and took Sylvain – a dancer whose movement signature is cushy and lush – further away from androgyny. In order to clarify our intentions, we focused on the qualities associated with the Taoist principle of yang, described as bright, hard, masculine, round, odd-numbered and upward moving. In the first phase of our work we developed the movement language, and in the second we arranged that material in relation to a riveting work called Frisking Prolationum for 11 Percussionists by the Belgian composer and filmmaker, Thierry de Mey.

Sylvain premiered Yang at the 1998 Dance in Canada Festival in Ottawa. Five years later, for The Choreographer’s Trust, I developed a duet version for Sylvain with the magnificent Shannon Cooney. This remains one of my favourite dances, and both the solo and duet versions have been staged many times by my company and The School of Toronto Dance Theatre.” PB

If you’re taken with the music of Thierry de Mey, watch this excerpt of a work he created with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker for Rosas entitled ROSAS DANST ROSAS.

Sanctum (1991)

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We’re in 1991 now, with Peggy living and working in Toronto under the moniker Peggy Baker | Solo Dance, the precursor to today’s company, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, creating her first collaboration with composer and musician - and now her husband! - Ahmed Hassan.

“Sanctum holds a very significant place in my creative life. It marks new commitments: to Ahmed Hassan and his daughter Shireefa; to Toronto; and to a mindful and devoted practice as a solo dancer. Sanctum proposes artistic practice as spiritual practice, and delineates a tightly circumscribed space for each performer: the dancer standing in a rectangle of light marked at the corners with short dowels; the musician, cross-legged on a carpet, his instruments arrayed within reach. Even as I describe this, I feel myself falling into the measured tempo of ritual, within which each gesture and sound arrives with purpose and immediacy.

During the creation of Sanctum I had vivid memories of being in the presence of Martha Graham as an aspiring dancer – one in which she dared us students to declare, “I am a dancer, now,” and another in which she offered my name to me anew by inscribing in a book about her work, “For Peggy Baker, best wishes for her life and work, Martha Graham”. I felt the indelible influence of her technique in the shapes and dynamics of the choreography. I felt myself as a dancer whose work arises through the echoes and imprints of legacy as well as through the complexities and details of a unique life.“ - PB

Peggy gifted Sanctum to Nova Bhattacharya and Helen Jones as part of her Choreographer’s Trust project in 2002/03. Read more about the Choreographer’s Trust here.
For insight into Ahmed Hassan’s work as a composer, watch this 1986 video of Blue Snake, commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada from Robert Desrosiers, Ahmed Hassan and John Lang.