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.

move (2009)

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Created in 2009 for 24 dancers, and premiered as part of Toronto’s annual all-night contemporary art event, Nuit Blanche, move was a harbinger of a fundamental change in focus and programming for the coming decade for Peggy Baker Dance Projects. From 2010, Peggy’s role increasingly moved away from that of principal dancer in a solo-repertoire company to that of Artistic Director of Peggy Baker Dance Projects, and the choreographer of the company’s new ensemble works. She began to embed public engagement in the company’s projects by finding new ways of presenting work in alternative spaces, and by inviting community members to take part in her works.

Peggy writes: Between 2007 and 2011 I did five teaching residencies in Philadelphia sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Dance Advance, headed at that time by Bill Bissell. My very first residency took place in the studios of PHILADANCO!, a Black dance company with a storied history, and it was incredible to move through the halllways lined with photographs of the dancers going back through every generation of the company, and to work in the studios where the company’s classes and rehearsals took place.

One of the opening elements in the class I was teaching then was the ‘crescent roll’, a fundamental exercise devised by Steve Paxton as preparatory movement practice for Contact Improvisation. The rolling action across the floor requires both strength and suppleness and at first the underlying pattern can be confusing. To work through the confusion of coordination and direction I had the dancers working in pairs, with one dancer gently but firmly guiding the other through the twisting roll. The interaction looked extremely beautiful and as the dancers changed roles for each pass across the studio, I was struck by the powerful images of giving and receiving care that emerged. Added to the potency of witnessing this was the gorgeous sonic environment being created by the musician for my classes, guitarist Tim Motzer. On this same trip I happened to take in a retrospective exhibition of works by George Tooker that included images of couples embracing, of people asleep, and of men reclining sand dunes. The curving pathways of the dunes also brought to mind the raked gravel or sand of Zen dry gardens, and the patient work of the dancers rolling one another in the studio seemed to align somehow for me with the mindful practice of monk’s raking.

All of these images and associations came together for me as a very clear and rich premise for a durational work for a large cast that distills and illuminates the fundamental dualities of:

 -      touching and being touched / a basic modality for caregiving and receiving care, and for teaching and learning in dance

-       watching and being witnessed / the essential relationship between teacher and student, audience and performer, and of dancers together in class, rehearsal, performance

-       movement through the body and that same body’s movement through space 

The work premiered in Toronto for Nuit Blanche 2009 danced by a cast of 12 couples. For performances at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2011, I reduced the cast to 8 couples, who danced in a cycle of four repetitions, with the front rotating by 90 degrees and each dancer changing roles with their partner for each iteration. This version has now been staged many times – presented in galleries and public spaces in St Catharines, Kingston, Burlington, Hamilton, Fredericton and Calgary – danced by professional dancers and by community members. - PB

To read more about move from the perspective of a community participant, Andrea Frolic wrote a beautiful article for The Dance Current in 2019 entitled The Ecologies of Care after taking part in the staging of the work with the Art Gallery of Hamilton.