armour (2007/2010)

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The final piece in Peggy’s watershed program Confluence at Harbourfront Centre in 2010 was a reworking of a Doug Varone piece, his fourth to be acquired for the company’s repertoire. Peggy writes:

In 2007 I was included in the cast of a full evening work with Doug Varone and Dancers titled Dense Terrain. This was a hugely ambitious project including 12 performers, projections, sets, and original music by Nathan Larson. One of the early influences on the work was The Lives of a Cell, a book by Louis Thomas published in 1974, and read by both Doug and I – and so many others of our generation – at the time. Many of the essays in this book focused on social insects, and a fascinating duet in Dense Terrain for Natalie Desch and Daniel Charon held a strong imprint of that source material.

I totally loved that duet! And I no longer remember if I asked Doug if I could learn it, or if he suggested it himself, but certainly it was beautifully aligned with my dances inspired by Sylvia Safdie’s films of insects, and by bringing it together with my solo earthling and the trio coalesce, it created a wonderful program. Taking the duet outside the context of Dense Terrain, Doug allowed me to commission sound design by Debashis Sinha (who had also scored earthling and coalesce) and titled this version of his dance armour.

Deb’s score supported every aspect of the dance, enriching the impact and significance of each action, while Marc Parent’s exquisite lighting required Larry and I to be spatially exacting with every single move.  

Visual artist Brian Kelley sketched, and later completed with water colour, a beautiful series of small works capturing this brief and perfect dance. 

“It is the being touched that counts, rather than the touching.” Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

“Baker and Hahn are here more like archetypes, elemental and distilled representations of the human need for connection beyond the stereotypical, emotionally overcharged and romantic dance duets we’re used to seeing. They insinuate themselves into each other’s embrace, isolated yet together, driven by forces more mysterious than they can apprehend.” - Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

“…as Mr. Sinha’s music slowly built what emerged was an intimate, human portrait. Remaining on the floor the dancers cycled through interlocking embraces. Their bodies fit like an endlessly mutable jigsaw puzzle: a universe of two.” Julia Cervantes, The New York Times

earthling (2009)

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This week we’re looking at a work that was created for Vancouver’s legendary Dances for a Small Stage series, curated by Day Helesic and Julie-anne Saroyan. Peggy made this solo on and for herself, mining what would become a rich vien of movement invention inspired by a gift from Montreal visual artist, Sylvia Safdie.

Peggy writes: Throughout the 1980s I made regular visits to Montreal to teach classes and lead intensive workshops at Les Ateliers de Danse Moderne de Montreal, an ambitious training program established by Linda Rabin – one of the most influential teachers in my own life – and Candice Loubert. While I was in town, Linda always made a point of taking me to the studio of her great friend, the visual artist Sylvia Safdie, so that I could see Sylvia’s latest work and hear about the preoccupations that were driving it. Over the course of more than 20 years I was privileged with a rare view of the arc of Sylvia’s work. On a visit in 2007, Sylvia showed me a series of films of she’d recently done and shocked me completely by offering one of these to me as a possible premise for a dance. The film was a close-up of a beetle on its back, in its death throes. Sylvia had worked choreographically with the footage, slowing it down, creating repeated loops and reversals of action. I found the film both sorrowful and exquisite. I had no idea how I might approach it, but I accepted her gift in all humility.

That same year I happened to made a trip to Dia Beacon, where I encountered – among a multitude of deeply affecting works – a series of large plywood “boxes” by Donald Judd. These objects were cubes, closed on all sides, but with the top set part way down into the interior, tipped in one direction and tilted in the other, and with the complex angles of each edge perfectly fitted into the sides. Looking down into the box I felt as though I was looking at a maquette of a stage gone wildly awry and with the proscenium providing a view from above rather than from the front.

I had images from Sylvia’s beetle and Donald Judd’s boxes rattling around in my head when I got an invitation from Day Helesic and Julie-anne Saroyan to present a work for Dances for a Small Stage in Vancouver. The venue was a Legion Hall on Commercial Drive with a stage that was truly and remarkably small. Riffing on Judd’s boxes, I immediately thought of this as the perfect opportunity to install a tilted and tipped floor that would fill the entire stage. Putting myself down onto this surface without ever getting up on my feet created the illusion that the audience was looking down on me, and this possibility sparked the idea of working with movement ideas related to Sylvia’s beetle.

Larry Hahn created a fantastic floor for me, supported by a substructure of struts, and I painted the surface in a way that I thought suited the world of the struggling creature that I had stranded on its surface.  

Everything alive on earth is caught up in the cycle of birth and growth and death that is also a source of renewal and transformation. PB

To explore Sylvia Safdie’s most recent exhibition As I Walk, visit YouTube here.

Watch Peggy’s 2020 short, Influences and Intersections - Donal Judd and Sylvia Safdie to discover more about earthing.