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.