Are You Okay (2011)

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Another of a small handful of plays in Peggy’s company repertoire, Are You Okay occurs during the period when Peggy largely moves away from performing and towards becoming a choreographer of works for small ensembles of dancers engaged by by her company.

Peggy writes: Remembering Are You Okay gives me a chance to think back over the extraordinary events through which I became a colleague and friend of the magnificent actor and playwright Michael Healey.

In 2000, I was contacted by Layne Coleman – then Artistic Director or Theatre Passe Muraille – about performing with him in a fundraiser called Blind Date. The idea was to pair unlikely performance partners for a one-night-only event, and Layne and I collaborated on plans for a short work together. The day of the event I got a call from Layne explaining that he could no longer be present and that Michael Healey had agreed to take his place. A few minutes later Michael and I spoke by phone, and I suggested that rather than planning anything ahead of time, we meet for the first time in front of the audience, make our plans then and there, and immediately perform together. It turned out to be a super-charged, inspired, and inspiring experience that left us each dreaming about doing something together in the future.

Fast forward to 2008. Michael saw the Toronto premiere of my dance Portal – a dance that moved him deeply – and when he contacted me about it we ended up having a heartfelt conversation in which I confessed my misgivings about continuing to perform as a dancer now that I was well into my sixties. In response, Michael wrote me a gorgeous, harrowing poem based on a story I had shared with him about being in class with a radiantly gifted a young dancer. When I thanked him for his gift, he suggested the idea of doing a show together, and we started exchanging ideas. Just as we got going on that – completely out of the blue – I lost my performance partner for Denise Clarke’s Radio Play, and by some miracle of timing, Michael was able to step in for him. The work together was intense and exhilarating.

Early in 2009 Michael sent me an outline for the performance piece he imagined – a simultaneous one-man, one-woman-show concerning creation, physical mastery, and the ephemeral nature of professional competency. With Michael’s permission, I memorized the text of his email describing our show and spoke it while I danced, performing on the tiny stage of Lula Lounge for a Nightwood Theatre fundraiser. It was my first movement exploration for our show, and I can still trace some of the choreographic ideas for Are You Okay back to that sketch.

Collaborating with director Daniel Brooks, sound designer Debashis Sinha, and lighting designer Rebecca Picherack, Are You Okay premiered at Factory Theatre in March 2011.

“Are You Okay deliberates questions every artist must consider at some point of his/her career and Healey and Baker capture the delicate nature of this discussion with proportion, sophistication, and playfulness, a testament that they have come to terms with the challenge of the unchangeable, and that they have emerged more deeply immersed…” Tina Chu, MONDOMAGAZINE

“…such grace, such discipline, such victory…The thing’s a jewel.” Robert Cushman, The National Post

Aleatoric Duet No. 1 (2011)

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 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.

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.

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

coalesce (2010)

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coalesce is Peggy’s first ensemble work to be included in her company’s main stage programming. It premiered in Toronto in a concert titled Confluence, presented at EnWave - now Harbourfront Centre Theatre.

Peggy writes: After 20 years of making solos for myself, I was extremely curious about what might happen if I engaged in a creative process with a small group of dancers. I thought that a trio would be within reach for me and brought together as the cast three dancers I deeply admired – Kate Holden, Sean Ling and Sahara Morimoto. I had used one of Sylvia Safdie’s films as a foundational resource for my solo earthling, but there were several others of two insects together and of whole groups of insects that were also fascinating, so I started there.

The dancers and I dug in to learning about communication among insects via pheromones, and played with movement patterns inspired by the many insect appendages including 3 sets of limbs, antennae, wings and mandibles. A very particular sensibility arose by shifting concepts around sensory discernment and by working with the idea of an exoskeleton – a hard, brittle exterior. The trio that arose was highly stylized and absolutely fascinating to watch.

Debashis Sinha was present in the studio with us, sitting at his computer and wearing a set of headphones so that he could develop the sound design parallel to the emergence of the choreography. It did take me some time to land on the proper costuming, but in staging an excerpt of coalesce for the graduating class at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Jennifer Dallas created a fantastic set of costumes and I turned to her to make a new set for my company using the same design.

I took intense pleasure in creating this dance with Kate, Sean, Sahara, and in the new ways of working that arose with Deb and with lighting designer Marc Parent. I knew without a doubt that I had found a way forward beyond making and performing solos, and I moved eagerly into a new phase in my dance life. PB

“Baker's new program indeed transports us to an otherworldly place beyond conventional human experience.” Read more from Michael Crabb’s review in The Toronto Star

The dancer and the insect expert is an article about the involvement of Dr. Darryl Gywnne, a behavioural ecologist and professor of biology at U of T Mississauga in Peggy’s presentaton of Confluence.