The Perfect Word (2014)

This week we’re looking at Peggy’s 4th durational work created for Nuit Blanche, The Perfect Word, inspired by words and languages, expressed through the bodies and lived experiences of 10 outstanding Toronto-based dancers. Peggy writes:

I have a deep appreciation for durational dance works – performances that continue over an extended span of time with the audience arriving and departing as they wish at any point along the way. Choreographic works in this vein lend themselves to ceremony and ritual, to open structural forms that swell and subside incrementally, and I love offering the audience the chance to slow down and simply witness a dance performance almost the way they would take in a painting or a night sky.

Eager to create a new work for Nuit Blanche 2014, I imagined a collection of ten 6-minute solos with spoken word cycling constantly over the course of 12 hours – each dance focused on a single word and each dancer speaking in a different language. Turning to longtime collaborator Debashis Sinha, I asked him if he could create a score that would be developed over the duration of the performance by sourcing words spoken by audience members at an open mic, with the idea that each hour a new layer of sound would be overlaid on the recordings of the prior hours. With a long series of illustrations projected onto the wall behind the performers, audience members were invited to step up to the microphone and, speaking in any language, match a word with the picture. These voices created a soundscape that constantly increased in density.

There are more languages spoken in Toronto than in any other city in the world. The Perfect Word celebrates the cultural multiplicity of 21st Century Toronto, the beauty and potency of hearing people speak in their mother tongue, and the richness and authenticity of a fully embodied voice.

The words at the heart the solos, the extraordinary dancers for this project, and the languages they spoke were: FLOWER / Sahara Morimoto / Japanese; WHEEL / Meryem Alaoui / Arabic; FIRE / Mateo Galindo Torres / Spanish; TREE / Jesse Dell / Cree; LADDER / Louis Laberge-Côté / French; KEY / Sarah Fregeau / English; HEART / Nova Bhattacharya / Bengali; BOAT / Zhenya Cerneacov / Russian; FEET / Ana Groppler / German; CLOUD / William Yong / Cantonese.

In 2016 The Perfect Word was presented as part of inFuture, a site-specific festival on the abandoned west island on Ontario Place in Toronto, where it was performed in cycles of 3-hours with a new technicolor, moving projection design by Jeremy Mimnagh.

land | body | breath (2014)

This week we look at Peggy’s most ambitious work situated in a gallery space - 2014’s land | body | breath, with a cast of 8 dancers and 2 vocalists inhabiting the Thomson Collection of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Peggy writes:

Between 2003 and 2011 I brought my work into the AGO for special performances on 5 different occasions: as a soloist for the exhibition Reconfiguring Degas (2003); amid the massive sculptural forms of Henry Moore on a stormy night in 2005 accompanied by crashing thunder and the live vocals and percussion of Ahmed Hassan and Debashis Sinha; in the Walker Court for an afternoon performance of The Disappearance of Right and Left (in 2007); interior with moving figures (in 2009) – four works performed simultaneously in four different galleries and cycling over the course of 70 minutes (Strand danced by Jessica Runge, three story house danced by Jacqueline Ethier, armour danced by Larry Hahn and me; and move for a cast of 16); and a performance of Aleatoric Solo No. 1 by Sahara Morimoto for the exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York (2011). In each case, it was thrilling to bring my choreography into juxtaposition, alignment and resonance with accomplished and provocative works of visual art, and into a new relationship between performer and viewer. These experiences left me wanting to create a work expressly for performance in a gallery setting, and in 2014 I was able to realize that ambition with the premiere of land | body | breath, a site-specific work featuring dancers Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Benjamin Kamino, Kate Holden, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, and Jessica Runge; with vocalist Ciara Adams and my primary collaborator, vocalist/musical director Fides Krucker.

The AGO’s Thomson Collection houses iconic images of the Canadian landscape and exquisite First Nations sculptural pieces within a network of 21 galleries. The many interconnected spaces provide the possibility of intimate viewing within a single gallery or vantage points that provide visual access to several spaces simultaneously. Our performance had two chapters of about 25 minutes each. In the first chapter the dancers each performed as soloists within their own gallery space while the vocalists wended their way throughout the network of galleries without ever meeting. The rich and startlingly beautiful vocal score created by Fides for all 10 performers evoked birdsong, buzzing insects, crashing waves, groaning wind, and cracking ice that echoed throughout the galleries. The audience moved freely, shifting location and proximity as they chose. At the half-way point a slow migration drew the performers and viewers into the large central space.  In this second chapter the dancers moved as an ensemble, calling up images of wind, water, and earth. They intensified their vocalizing as a chorus, further enriching the soundscape and underscoring the solo vocal forays of Fides and Ciara. In the concluding scene, haunting echoes of songs by Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young emerged and dissolved.

In June of 2018 we were invited to take land | body | breath to the National Gallery of Canada as part of the Canada Dance Festival. The richly embodied performances by Fides and Ciara this time joined by Nicole Rose Bond, Sarah Fregeau, Sahara Morimoto, Andrea Nann, David Norsworthy, Jessica Runge, Mateo Galindo Torres and William Yong surpassed my highest aspirations. I will never forget the impact of the final scene in which the dancers were aligned like a twisting and undulating spine under two massive sculptural renderings of whale skeletons by Brian Jungen. Constructed with parts and pieces of white, plastic lawn chairs, Jungen’s powerful rendering of the natural world subverted through the extraction of oil and the manufacture of plastic charged the final scene of land | body | breath with the tremendous urgency of his message.

stone leaf shell skin (2014)

Opening a book I had owned for many years, I began pouring over photographs by Edward Weston and became fascinated, yet again, by his preoccupation with the eroticism of contour, and by the associations among disparate subjects that his images propose. A vast rockface, a lush and deeply veined cabbage leaf, the brittle and lustrous surface of a coiled shell, and the undulating curves of a naked body reclining in a sand dune are all aspects of a richly sensual world.

I pictured a group of men moving in a sonic world shaped by the sound of a cello and underscored by deep electronic drone tones. Cellist Shauna Rolston and I brainstormed on a composer and our commission was accepted by Heather Schmidt. Working in silence with superb dancers Ric Brown, Sean Ling, and Mateo Galindo Torres, I began a steady stream of exchanges of film and audio files with Heather. The 30-minute work that emerged – costumed by Caroline O’Brien and lit by Marc Parent – called on all four performers to rise to formidable physical and expressive demands and offered unforgettable moments of sublime beauty. PB

“… beautifully crafted and elegant juxtapositions of real and imagined worlds.” Kathleen Smith, NOW Magazine

Aleatoric Duet No. 2 (2014)

The Aleatoric permutations and combinations keep coming, this time featuring two highly intuitive and elegant performers. Peggy writes:

I have been supremely fortunate to have had the dancers Andrea Nann and Sean Ling bring their artistry as performers to many works in my repertoire. For this third dance in my aleatoric series, each of them began as usual by calling up phrases, episodes and moments from past works. I collaborated with them one at a time to reimagine and rearrange the movement material as two extended solos, each situated within a square of 24’ X 24’. Once each solo was complete, I brought Andrea and Sean into the space together to explore and develop the possibilities offered by their many intersections.

Improvising musician John Kameel Farah read the dance like a score, composing and performing in real time with an elaborate array of electronic equipment. Caroline O’Brien dressed the dancers in simple black pieces – Andrea in a narrow shift and pants and Sean in wide legged trousers. Marc Parent’s stunningly beautiful lighting (honoured with a Dora Award) broke the white floor (which floated like an island on a black ground) into a series of rectangles or smaller squares and climaxed in a bright yellow square, dead centre, in which the seated dancers reached into the negative space around one another’s bodies in an elaborate series of gestures before finally turning away from each other while the sound reached a peak of density and volume

In 2021, Sean performed his part alone – with John Farah improvising remotely from Berlin and projected onto the upstage scrim – for a beautifully filmed live-streamed pandemic performance from Vernon, British Columbia, using the title Aleatoric Solo No. 3.

“The moody work – part of a series in which dancers mine Baker’s rich legacy of movement vocabulary, then make it their own – introduces the evening’s defining elements: the stark solemnity of the performance space (impeccably enhanced by the work of lighting designer Marc Parent), onstage musicianship (… composer John Kameel Farah improvising from a perch high on the back wall of the stage overlooking the dancers), Baker’s alternately introspective and expansive movement vocabulary and, most of all, rigour and attention to detail.” Kathleen Smith, NOW Magazine

Box: la femme au carton (2011, acquired 2014)

The third work of master Quebecois choreographer Paul-Andre Fortier entered the repertoire of Peggy Baker Dance Projects in 2014, appearing on the he:she concert program. Paul-André writes:

The first time I used the “box” was during a research period for the creation of the solo loin, très loin with Peggy Baker. I abandoned the idea of a box, only to bring it back a few years later for my solo 1X60 (2006) in Japan. Afterwards, in 2011, I reused this idea, this time choreographing an entire solo with a box. I then gave this solo to Peggy, who danced it superbly in Toronto. It is poignant to think that this concept, after several transformations, has returned to its source. The box would take nearly a dozen years to find its way back to Peggy.

Peggy writes: For a rehearsal early in 2000 while we were working on loin, très loin, Paul-André brought in a rather large cardboard box (or did he simply find it in the studio?) and instructed me to manipulate it in various ways – holding it against my torso and closing and opening the flaps, orienting the box vertically or horizontally, holding it above, below, or beside me while rotating slowly… We were working in a studio with windows high on the walls and dazzling winter sunshine was slanting down onto the floor in shafts. The next day Paul-André let the box go (it never reappeared) and worked instead with the shafts of light – which became a central design element in the completed dance.

A decade later, Paul-André once again picked up a cardboard packing box to use as part of 1x60 – a site specific work for a garden in Japan – before going on to create a dance for the theatre; a spare and exceedingly detailed dance, requiring patience, care, and even dedication titled Box: le homme au carton.

In 2014, in an incredible act of love and generosity – and knowing how much I would appreciate the depth of the experience as an interpreter – Paul-André offered his dance to me. I learned Box in tandem with his creative assistant, the wise and warm Ginelle Chagnon, both of us up on our feet; Paul-André seeing the dance from the outside for the first time, and Ginelle seeing it from the inside for the first time. The sound design by Alain Thibault included long interludes of silence contained within a single uninterrupted track of 25 minutes, and in each extended lull time slowed down a little more until finally it seemed to disappear completely.

I am profoundly honoured to have been invited to inhabit this late solo by one of the dance world’s greatest solo creator/performers.

“… a trippy interaction with a simple cardboard box that assumes totemic power from her slow moving attention … a universe of narrative possibilities…” Kathleen Smith, NOW Magazine

 “The box, variously manipulated to expose a cross-pattern on its base, becomes an emblem of retrieved memories, even a portal into the dancer’s inner consciousness. Baker gives a thoughtfully intense performance, proving that even as the dancing body ages its innate intelligence continues to grow.”  Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star