Aleatoric Solo No. 1 (2013)

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.

Photo of Sahara Morimoto by John Lauener.

Aleatoric Duet No. 1 (2011)

 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.