unmoored — Creation Catalogue Blog — Peggy Baker Dance Projects

This week we hit the final solo that Peggy commissioned for- and performed- herself. A sequel to a work she premiered 14 years previously. Peggy writes:

In 2003 I turned to the extraordinary dance artist Sarah Chase to make a work for me. Sarah creates in a genre she describes as dancestories, and prior to working together she set me the task of writing two stories for every year of my life. When the time came to go into the studio together, I told Sarah that there was one aspect of my life that I hadn’t written about and could not share in the public sphere. Sarah agreed to my caveat, and we went on to create a very beautiful work titled The Disappearance of Right and Left. More than a decade later I went back to Sarah to let her know that I was now ready to think back on the events that I had previously held apart and to mindfully look to those events as the basis for the creation of a new dancestory.

In March of 2017, I sat down at a desk, in a small room, in the Bogliasco Foundation villa, where I was undertaking a 5-week fellowship in Italy. Guided by Jane Hirschfield’s extraordinary book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry , I wrote down the stories I had not been previously ready to share. At the end of my residency I arranged the stories in a rough performance draft – incorporating some initial movement devised by Sarah – and shared the in-progress work that included a poem by Rumi as the final scene, with the other Bogliasco Foundation fellows.

In the months that followed, Sarah and I worked together to develop a choreographic staging to frame and hold a distillation of my writing as a dancestory titled unmoored. The episodes that I recount in unmoored describe events during the 20-year arc of my marriage to the musician, composer, and disability rights activist, Ahmed Hassan. The complex and emotionally charged themes of disability, caregiving, and death at the heart of this work are handled by Sarah with tremendous sensitivity.

One of the poems included in Hirschfield’s book struck an especially deep chord with me. This poem by the 13th century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen captures something essential about the utter emptiness of loss, and of how that empty space can in fact offer an opening for illumination:

unmoored
in midnight water
no waves, no wind
the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight

In addition to the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy, unmoored was created with the invaluable support of residencies at Tiamat House on Hornby Island B.C., (through the generosity of Judith Lawrence); and Ottawa Dance Directive, Artistic Director Yvonne Coutts / Associate Director Lana Morton.

unmoored premiered at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, with subsequent presentations at The Citadel (Toronto), EDAM (Vancouver), ArtSpring (Salt Spring Island B.C.) Crimson Coast Dance (Nanaimo), and Ottawa Dance Directive.

Winner - Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in a Dance Production: Peggy Baker

“The work is one of total perfection as the heartbreaking text and Baker’s eloquent movement swing back and forth between darkness and light. “ Paula Citron

“Chase has shaped a performance that Baker speaks, sometimes reading, sometimes reciting, raw in its emotion and polished in its performance. As an artist, Baker needed to make this dance story, for it marks the renewal of creativity, going forward with undying love on the wings of Rumi.” Susan Walker

All photos below of Peggy Baker by Aleksandar Antonijevic.

This week’s work is a truly landmark piece in Peggy’s repertoire. A dancestory created with Sarah Chase, The Disappearance of Right and Left artfully shares stories from Peggy’s family history in a deeply compelling work that speaks to audiences across genres and generations.

Peggy writes: Sarah Chase is a superb artist whose body of work stands as an utterly unique and hugely valuable contribution to the art form. Sarah frames memoir within choreographic structures, combining text and movement in ways that allow the inner life and personal history of the performer to be drawn into alignment with the life experience and empathetic capacities of the audience witnessing the work.

I’m thinking that my own dance with spoken text (a true story, 1997) was made the same year that Sarah created her first dancestory, Muzz. Sarah’s dance was much longer and more complex structurally, but the biggest difference was that Sarah spoke in the first person – unabashedly using the identifier “I” – whereas I spoke in the third person, veiling my relationship to the events I described through the use of the descriptor “the woman”. A studio showing of Muzz by Sarah at Damn Straight on Spadina Avenue in Toronto remains an indelible memory and the power of the work, and of her performance, was absolutely the inspiration for approaching her with the idea of commissioning a work in this style for me.

Six months prior to going into the studio, Sarah assigned me the task of writing two stories representing each year of my life. 51 years old at the time, I needed to excavate 102 stories from my life. Conversations with my parents about my childhood also brought forward stories from their own lives and in the end, Sarah included stories that spanned five generations in my family.

The Disappearance of Right and Left emerged as a work of 45 minutes that was both terrifying and cathartic to perform. It revealed deep connections of experience and learning across the history of my family and allowed me to come to terms with some of the most dismantling turning points in my own life.

Sarah possesses the extraordinary ability to compose and direct performance works centered on personal history without ever veering into the trite or sentimental. Dancestories made for herself, for Marc Boivin, Andrea Nann, and a second work made for me in 2018, (unmoored), comprise a truly remarkable collection of works. PB

Sarah adds this: Peggy was a pivotal teacher, mentor and guide in my life, and I was thrilled and awed to be creating with her in 2004.

I loved how Peggy spoke when she taught, the vivid way she had with language, the colour of joy in her voice, and her inimitable gestures. I knew I wanted to make a work that would allow Peggy to speak stories from her life, to share her rich inner world, and to magnify her extraordinary gestures into a danced language. I wanted to understand her biography and how it had shaped the artist I loved, and if possible to reveal this to an audience.

These 102 stories/memories she assembled sparked deep conversation between us. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the many possible performance directions the material could take. (The first rehearsal we shared for a small audience was over an hour and a half long!) We ended up focussing on 12 stories that were moments when she or a member of her family, experienced a deep shift in perception, which we captured in the title.

To me, Peggy’s dancing contained the big dome of the high prairie skies around Edmonton where she grew up; the open geography of her childhood called forth in her long expressive arms and hands. So part of the beginning of the rehearsal process was creating a dance based on images and experience of being in that landscape. I wanted this to be the ground for the emotional stories that she would be sharing during the piece.

Peggy and I poured over photographs that represented the 12 essential stories we finally chose. In the first performed versions there was a large backdrop that had these double-sided images on it. They swivelled to reveal a full prairie landscape that was on the reverse of the 12 individual story images. I realised, eventually, that the backdrop was actually limiting the performances. Peggy’s gestures were conjuring so deeply the worlds of the stories, that having a literal photographic illustration behind her was an unnecessary distraction. We stopped using the backdrop.

This process was an incredible journey into Peggy’s inner life. It deeply changed the way I thought about creating, and continues to inform my work to this day. SC

“Disappearance is autobiographical…Chase makes full use of Baker’s wonderfully eloquent arms that carve the air in generous sweeping motions or settle momentarily into a detailed sculptural pose.” Michael Crabb , The National Post

The Disappearance of Right and Left is one of the few works in Peggy’s repertoire danced to music with lyrics. For a deep dive on Joni Mitchell’s classic song Amelia, selected by Peggy to feature in this show, visit jonimitchell.com