Cirrus (1997/2000)

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A faculty member of The Juilliard School since 1995, Irene Dowd has been a foundational presence in Peggy Baker’s dance life, providing neuromuscular training and creating Cirrus on and for Peggy in 1997. Peggy explains:

“It’s beautiful to think back to this brief and exquisite dance, choreographed by my dear friend and cherished mentor Irene Dowd. Beginning in 1985 – and continuing over the next two decades – Irene guided me in discovering the inner landscape of my body, in all its mystery and magnificence, through an evolving movement practice grounded in functional anatomy.

In 1997 we shifted our focus to a dance choreographed for me by Irene. In a recent exchange of memories around our process, Irene remembers being under the sway of two important paintings by her late husband, Charles Stokes – the dazzling and rhapsodic Perpetua (which he was just completing) and the labyrinthine Inner Temple (which was newly underway).

Irene titled the dance Cirrus, as she felt the definition – “a tendril, a long thread-like organ by which a plant climbs; a light fleecy cloud at a high elevation” – sounded as though it was describing the movement. We had created in silence, but once the work was completed, I suggested dancing it with a John Cage work titled Dream. I didn’t have a chance to perform Cirrus until 2000, when it premiered as part of an evening titled Interior View. Irene allowed me to finish her dance by reaching my hand to the piano on the last note. No photographs of this dance exist, so it remains a treasured memory.” PB

To see an example of Irene’s approach to teaching functional anatomy through choreography, visit her website here.

To learn more about artist Charles Stokes, visit SeattleArtResource here.

Photo of Irene Dowd by Matthew Karas.

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.

Assara (1995)

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This week, Peggy looks back at a work choreographed for her by one of the founders of Toronto Dance Theatre, Patricia Beatty.

“Though she died in 2020, Trish will always remain a towering figure in my life. I met her in 1968 at a summer theatre school where she was teaching a daily movement class. The wisdom, sensuality and riveting immediacy of Trish’s dancing knocked me completely over. She inhabited her female body with grace and gravity. She spoke in the language of poetry - grand metaphors, invocations of the natural world, frank references to the body as the locus of desire, pleasure, intuition and creation. Up until that point I had aspired to become an actor, but from the day that I met her I understood that I had found my life’s work.

When I moved to Toronto in the fall of 1971 it was expressly to study with the company Trish co-directed, Toronto Dance Theatre. She always took my aspirations in dance absolutely to heart. Her guidance was honest and nuanced and she demonstrated through her dedication to the technique of Martha Graham that the physical practice of a dancer is an act of devotion. When, eventually, she was no longer capable of the rigours of Graham floorwork, she grieved the loss deeply. It was at this tremendously challenging time in her life that Trish suggested we once again intensify our relationship through the creation of a solo.

Trish’s highly specific and unique physicality permeated each of her dances, and it was an extraordinary experience to feel her impulses alive within my own body as I her danced her work. She was always extremely articulate about her choreographic intentions, so I’ll share her program note so that you can hear her speaking about this dance in her own voice” - PB

“Assara is a revered name from the ancient scripts of the pre-Hellenic islands of Crete and Cyprus. The word means pillar and it was used in these sophisticated civilizations to invoke the power of the Goddess. I have used it as a title for this dance about the renewal of true justice because we understand the symbol of a pillar of wisdom and a pillar of strength. The wise woman, once the central inhabitant of the female figure of justice, has been sadly and dangerously lost in our time. Where we look for fairness and compassion, we now see revenge and argumentativeness. This dance is a call for the renewal of true fairness and compassion in our thinking and practice of justice – it is also a call for the return of the wise woman into our lives and communities.” - Trish Beatty

To read more about the early years of TDT under the triumvirate leadership of Patricia Beatty, David Earle, and Peter Randazzo visit Dance Collection Danse here.

Person Project (1991)

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This week we arrive at the last in a series of works that Peggy commissioned from esteemed choreographers in the early days of her solo company. Person Project was created for Peggy by NYC dancer and choreographer, Tere O’Connor.

“I first saw Tere O’Connor in a concert of Rosalind Newman’s work at Movement Research in lower Manhattan. The dancers were wearing practice clothes and Tere had on a kind of loose knitted shirt with sleeves that fluttered a few inches below his fingertips. His dancing was precise and delicate, organized according to an inscrutable logic. His gaze was cast downward, or perhaps inward, and I could not take my eyes off him.

At Danspace I encountered him in his own work – the duet Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby with Nancy Coenen – and was thunderstruck by his images and by the thud of realization that dropped for me. Tere also saw me perform (he sited Lar Lubovitch’s Exultate Jubilate) and one day he waited for me after a class I was teaching, introduced himself, and asked if I would dance for him in a quartet project, The Organization of Sadness. With hindsight, I understand how the androgyny of my body and my lack of femininity as a dancer made me a good choice in terms of supporting an underlying premise in his work — the disruption of expectation for conformity around gender expression.

Tere made Person Project for me in 1991. At Unique Clothing on lower Broadway I tried on a succession of vintage dresses, and Tere and Nancy chose a red velvet party dress lined with stiffening buckram. The bodice was hard and flat and the skirt made a tremendous whap folding in on itself with every spin. Person Project is 20 minutes long and performed in silence until the very end, so the dress provided a kind of percussive accompaniment. I made very detailed notes on the inner workings of the dance that tracked the shift of states and emotions in order to keep the momentum of the dance moving forward without the markers of a soundtrack to navigate the way.

Tere is an absolute iconoclast in an art form in which an alignment with trends in form and content often determine success. Working within the medium of choreography he also pushes against it. His dances involve precise imagery and motions, but they are also a working-out-of-things through investigation, accident, self-correction, and erasure. I count myself extraordinarily fortunate to have worked with him.” PB

Tere writes about this time in the early 90s: “I was a young artist when I met Peggy Baker and asked her to dance in my work. I remember being gobsmacked the first time I saw her dance. I then got to meet this unique creature who was an icon for me, but also very available and most importantly, thoughtful. The work I asked her to be a part of was only the second dance I had made with other performers in it! I did not know what I was doing yet as a choreographer. I knew what I was attempting to move away from and I knew that I was in a state of experimentation; not looking for manifestoes, or aesthetic proclamations, just a way to work that included my intuition about the form. I was in this process of questioning dance. Peggy entered that realm unflinchingly, like an open book. She graced The Organization of Sadness with her presence and placed trust in me.  She put her incredible body and mind to work right next to my queries and it was a joy.  This early support from such an intelligent, venerated dance artist contributed greatly to my confidence in choosing more anomalous pathways as I forged my choreographic imprint. 

One does not arrive at any substantive knowledge before working for a good while, and I was in a process of parsing out assumptions around gender, virtuosity, musicality and presence in dance, seeking to individuate beyond the default settings of western dance history. I was looking for an expressive vehicle for the capaciousness of persona and an internal life. Choreography seemed to be a perfect container for the ever-changing dynamics of consciousness. As a queer artist, I had understood early on that the facade of a person and their internal world are rarely indicators of each other. So much of what is roiling underneath is held hostage by the requirements of facing other humans.

When I created Person Project for Peggy, I wanted to start by finding a generic human presence and then build a person and an internal world with great variations. I did not, however, want it to etch a visual mark on the surface of the work. Perhaps inspired by performers like Liv Ullman or Isabelle Adjani, two extraordinarily subtle actresses of the day, I felt Peggy’s uncanny ability to electrify her dancing with emotionality was a perfect building block. She successfully avoided the all-purpose, melodramatic grimace, so common in dancers at that time, to create an internalized performance with compelling contrasts of emotion. The being who inhabits this dance engenders great tenderness. It is a person who is perhaps driven by unnamed emotional territories. Her masterful performance was so subtle, and so deeply poignant.

Peggy Baker’s magnanimous presence in my life helped launch me into an unapologetic exploratory process that has not left me to this day. Her early support for my work holds inestimable value as an initial generator for my career, one blessed  by other such benevolent people along the way. I am so grateful to Peggy Baker and so astounded at everything she has accomplished as an artist–and a person.“ TO

"You can sense the compulsive quality of the movement - the pushing, pulling, opening and shutting of the body (and spirit); the effort and concentration required to set its directions." - Alina Gildner, The Globe and Mail

For more information about Tere O’Connor’s and the theme of ambiguity in his work, visit Classical Voice here.
For a fun look at the history of the vintage clothing scene in New York, visit racked.com here.

This Isn't The End (1991)

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The second commissioned work from James Kudelka in Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ repertoire, This Isn’t The End has a decidedly kooky edge to it. Explaining the method to his madness, James writes:

”When Peggy asked me to help oversee an evening at the PDT* that would include Romeo and Juliet Before Parting I thought it was important that the program include something with whimsy. For me, contemporary dance programs always had a tendency to take themselves very seriously. Creating something lighter and whimsical would be a challenge for us both.

The score of This Isn’t the End was created by John Oswald who wrote three pieces based on re-edits of readings of Agatha Christie mystery novel talking books - a garbled recreation of a few murder scenarios. And I asked Peggy to play the role of an old fashioned nurse, in white lab coat and striped hat. Peggy collected some wonderful props to go with that, and Marc Parent lit the stage with exposed fluorescent institutional lighting. The dance was unusual and surprising and answered the call for some lightness, and mystery - and accessibility - but it was also a little insane.” JK

Peggy adds: “Thinking back on This Isn’t the End, what really stands out is the joy of the rehearsals, all of the laughter James and I shared. I was wearing the costume with all of its many pieces early on in rehearsals — lingerie, white stockings, zip-front nurse’s uniform, snap-closure lab coat, lace-up shoes, fold-and-button nurse’s cap — and we laughed over the comparison to Jean-Pierre Perrault’s dancers, wearing their shirts, suits and ties, coats, hats and boots in rehearsal for JOE. We were the ridiculous to their sublime!

In addition to the elaborate costume there were props galore, each used in a multitude of ways — a watch, a pen, latex gloves, a surgical mask, a stethoscope, a huge syringe, a condom I inflated and sent aloft… and in a nod to Mark Morris’s Ten Suggestions, (which also had many props to manipulate) James once referred to This Isn’t the End as One Hundred and Ten Suggestions.

James also made one of these Agatha Christie mystery dances for Patricia Fraser, and though our solos were never danced on the same program, she does leave her shoes behind her when she exits the stage at the end of her solo, and there is a (mysterious) pair of shoes onstage when my solo begins.” PB

A case for Miss Marple indeed.

For more information about composer John Oswald’s plunderphonic sampling style (and to see what websites used to look like in the olden days) visit plunderphonics.com.

* Premiere Dance Theatre, now the Fleck Theatre at Harbourfront.