Krishna’s Mouth (2006)

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Having first worked together in 1999 on Words Fail, and then in 2003 on The Transparent Recital, Peggy Baker and cellist Shauna Rolston team up for a third collaboration called Krishna’s Mouth in 2006.

Peggy writes: For an outdoor performance in the Toronto Music Garden on Queen’s Quay West Shauna and I performed a version of The Transparent Recital tailored to the setting, and to complete the program I asked her to open with a work that she would perform without me. Shauna chose Songs of Songs, a gorgeous work for cello and tape by Japanese/American composer Karen Tanaka. I instantly fell in love with this score, its slow spirals of melody tenuously interlacing and then floating apart on the currents of the underlying drone, and with crystalline bells piercing the undulating surface of the sound.

I reached out to Ms. Tanaka immediately to explore the possibility of choreographing a solo to this piece and when it turned out that no recording existed that I might work with she allowed me to arrange a recording session with Shauna. I took the recording with me to Circuit-est in Montreal where a teaching residency included studio time for my own creative work. I have vivid memories of the sound resonating in the spare studio and of the strong pull of the music into an unexpected narrative sphere.

I had been pouring over Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, a book in which she brings together myths and stories from across epochs and cultures as a way of contemplating how one might come to terms with the underlying existential sorrow of human life. At the time, I had just made the huge and dismantling shift from being my husband’s primary caregiver (he lived with a particularly aggressive and chronic form of multiple sclerosis) to his living in long-term care, and the sadness and guilt attached to this situation was tremendous. One story in Dillard’s book struck a particularly deep and resounding chord for me. It is a story about Lord Krishna as a baby. He’s with his mother, in a garden, and he’s crawling on the ground. He grabs a clod of earth and puts it in his mouth. His mother slaps his hand away, and when she reaches in to clean out the dirt, she sees the entire universe in his mouth. As a caregiver to my husband, I had felt as though he needed me to guide him and keep him safe, but this story turned that idea on its head and proposed him as my teacher, which he surely and far more truly was.

In dancing this work I speak this story out loud, many times. I understand that this story is not mine to tell. But it is a story that I needed to hear, a story that somehow found its way to me, and a story that lives in my body.

The Transparent Recital (2003)

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This week we look at a commissioned work from the hugely talented and irreverent Tedd Robinson. The Transparent Recital premiered in Toronto on a program entitled Home, and then toured to St. Mark’s Danspace in New York City, coinciding - purely coincidentally - with one of that city’s worst-ever blizzards, the President’s Day Blizzard in February 2003.

Of Tedd and this work, Peggy writes: Tedd Robinson had provided my very first opportunity for a solo concert in May 1990 as part of the 6th Festival of Canadian Modern Dance, an event he established in Winnipeg in 1985 and which flourished over seven years. He and I are part of the huge cohort of dancers who entered the dance world in the 1970s – both of us Libra Dragons born in 1952 – and nonetheless artists who have pursued very different paths. Tedd’s extraordinary signature as a solo performer in self-made works, and his far-ranging pursuits and accomplishments as a choreographer, artistic director, and mentor have made rich and profound contributions to Canada’s dance milieu over five decades and counting.

An admiring fan of his work, I took the opportunity of commissioning funds from Danspace Project in New York to invite Tedd to create a piece for me with cellist Shauna Rolston. Working with collaborators John Oswald (composer), Caroline O’Brien (costumes) and the late David Morrison (lighting), Tedd created a 30-minute work brimming with both poetry and peculiarity. My own reading of it cast Shauna and I as itinerant performers who each carried with us our childhood fantasies of being on stage. A suitcase I delivered from place to place finally came to rest beside a child-size chair in which I sat to open what turned out to be a victrola. I pulled a 78rpm recording out of a paper sleeve and when the needle was set down it played a recording of Shauna whistling a melody by Bach. After being seated on several of the full-size chairs ranged about the stage, Shauna also eventually arrived on a tiny chair where she took up her childhood instrument – a viola with an end pin – and played the music for the finale scene. Asked by Tedd for a possible title, I suggested The Transparent Recital and it sealed our work. PB

Tedd adds: When Peggy asked me to contribute a work to her repertoire, I was very honoured. We had known each other a long time and our aesthetics were complimentary but different.

I have found a rehearsal tape of the work and I am looking at it now as I write. Peggy is fearless, and what might seem comedic is just so broken and sad in my seeing of it, which I love. She makes this disjointed and non sequential and awkward movement narrative tell so many stories to me. There is posing in front of a microphone as if something important will be said then she walks away, to become a weird creature with thumb horns. Nothing makes sense, it is just so abstract. I would call it body intelligent abstract theatre, as Peggy’s body has so much intelligence.

I enjoyed watching the rehearsal tape so very much. So utterly odd! TR

“Baker shared the stage with one of Canada’s finest cellists, Shauna Rolston… As is so often the case with Tedd Robinson’s work, the ghost of René Magritte and his fellow surrealists seemed to be lurking in the background.” William Littler / The Toronto Star

To meet Tedd in the classic BathTub Bran series, visit YouTube here.

Words Fail (1999)

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Peggy’s approach to creating works alongside live musicians, including pianist Andrew Burashko, the TSO, and the Amici ensemble had begun to earn her a reputation as a serious collaborator for accomplished musicians. In 1999, Peggy began a long-association with acclaimed cellist (and incredible fashionista!) Shauna Rolston.

“In the fall of 1999, ballerina turned producer-curator-filmmaker, Veronica Tennant, invited me to create and perform a short work with cellist Shauna Rolston for a concert marking the opening of the Timms Centre for the Arts in Edmonton. As the artistic director of the gala evening, Veronica had programmed Alberta-born or Alberta-based artists working in music, dance, theatre, poetry, and literature. Though we had never met, Shauna and I both grew up in Alberta, and it was Veronica who brought us together for what would become the first work in a longstanding collaboration.

Shauna suggested several works for me to consider and we quickly settled on a brief, deeply stirring composition by Chan Ka Nin, Soulmate. Having performed to his music for Sylvain Quartet just a year prior, I was extremely excited to dance to another of Ka Nin’s works. Shauna provided me with a cassette recording to work with while I choreographed, but though the music was all there and very well performed, it did nothing to prepare me for the impact of dancing with Shauna live. From our very first run-through together, Shauna played the music from memory, but more than that, she played as if she was creating the music then and there, as if this music was all and everything she needed to express. Her physical intensity was like an energy field, and it catalyzed my dancing. Her playing unleashed the underlying despairI was carrying in relation to my husband’s relentlessly accelerating multiple sclerosis and I titled our work Words Fail.

Just five minutes long, this work for Shauna and I was further enhanced through contributions by a stellar design team: costume designer Caroline O’Brien, visual artist Ina Levitsky, and lighting designer Bonnie Beecher. Shauna and I continued to perform Words Fail together on her recital programs and in my dance concerts, and it was also captured as a short film directed by Veronica Tennant in 2001.” PB

 “… a haunting inner journey of mood and introspection.” Paula Citron, The Globe and Mail

If you’d like to explore the films of Veronica Tennant, and watch Words Fails, shot at the Banff Centre, in 1999, please visit Veronica’s site here.