Eunoia II (2016)

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After creating and self-presenting 4 durational works for Nuit Blanche, it was a wonderful surprise for Peggy to be invited to animate an interactive sound sculpture by Korean American creator Lisa Park for an official presentation as part of Nuit Blanche 2016. The work was part of the series And The Transformation Reveals, curated by Camille Hong Xin. Peggy writes:

Ms. Park creates visually stunning sculptural installations that often involve monitored biometric elements, such as heart rate and skin temperature, which initiate a change in vibration, sound, and/or colour within the work. A brief trip to New York allowed me to meet Lisa by visiting her in a communal artist-in-residence space at The New Museum in Lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from the street where I had lived in the 1980s. Lisa met me in the main foyer, and, flashing her ID lanyard to the security guard to take us beyond public access, she led to me an elevator from which we emerged into a buzzing hive of creation! In a huge room taking up what looked like the entire floor of the building, light flooded into a space with massive tables where an army of artists were at work. It was completely thrilling to enter this rarified world and to spend the next few hours with Lisa, learning about Eunoia II, the extraordinary piece on which we would be working together.

Eunoia II involves a series of shallow pans – basically speakers holding water – attached via a series of spokes very close to the floor. The individual activating the sculpture (in this case, me) is positioned at the centre of this array, wearing a headpiece equipped with sensors that read their brain waves.

I created a choreographic score for myself that involved rotating clockwise or counter clockwise while performing a list of 25 gestures in accumulating chains of varying lengths, ultimately getting longer (1 to 4, 1 to 3, 1 to 9, 1 to 4, 1 to 16, 1 to 5, 1 to 25) and then getting shorter ( 17 to 25, 10 to 16, 5 to 9, 1 to 4) the idea being that the simplicity of some chains of movement and the complexity of others would shift my brain waves so that there were peaks and lulls in neural activity. My brainwaves were transmitted into the sculpture creating vibration of the water in the shallow pans as well as emitting sound.

With her sculpture installed in the grand main floor foyer of First Canadian Place, Lisa managed the technology, wiring me up in my headpiece for each performance, and watching me, and also the spectators, keenly, throughout each of the 15-minute performances offered, once an hour from 7pm to 2am.

For Facebook users, you can view a brief video from Lisa Park shot during one of Peggy’s performances as part of Nuit Blanche 2016.

All photos courtesy of the City of Toronto.


Aleatoric Solo No. 2 (2016)

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This week we reach the final piece in Peggy’s Aleatoric series, instigated way back in 2010 with the original Aleatoria installation created for Nuit Blanche. Peggy writes about this final work in the series:

In 2015, I made an unforgettable trip to Japan with the dancer Sahara Morimoto, who was at that time the Artistic Associate with my company. We had been invited by Helen Price to teach a week-long workshop for the Yokohama Ballet Academy, and we made it the centrepiece of a 3-week adventure that began in Kyoto and finished in Tokyo. At the Yokohama Museum of Art, we saw a spectacular retrospective exhibition of work by Takashi Ishida, and I was especially struck by a massive canvas that stood tipped up on its corner in the centre of a gallery. This canvas had been painted on over and over again in successive iterations. It had been gashed. It had light projecting onto it. It was an object, and an artifact of its making. It also presented an environment into which one entered. It was a performance. 

The memory of my encounter with Ishida’s installation continued to work on me, and at some point I imagined the blank canvas with which he had begun. I thought about myself beginning a new work and my sense that I can never begin with a blank slate, an empty canvas, a tabula rasa. Rather, I have a sense that my fallibility, my flaws and inadequacies, the complexities of my history as both a person and an artist, mean that the “canvas” upon which I am working is already marred, marked, damaged. And so I took this idea of a “damaged canvas” as the central metaphor for my final aleatoric dance, a solo for the magnificent Kate Holden.

With a huge unpainted canvas ripped open with a long slash and tipped on its corner centre stage, Kate inhabited a world of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, within which she embodied prowess, vulnerability, fear, elation, fatigue, angst, and courage.

Her heroic solo – hugely demanding physically and vocally – closed the four-part program Phase Space. Composing each of those works was deeply fascinating for me as a choreographer, but my ambition with them was to create dances that possessed striking and unique identities that transcended the methods, mechanics, and mysteries of making them. The iconic American choreographer Merce Cunningham spoke eloquently on this point in relation to his own work: “Even with all this preparation, however complex it is, if it doesn’t become dance, then it’s meaningless.”

The concert in which this work featured, Phase Space, was honoured with a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Sound Design for John Kameel Farah and Fides Krucker.

Aleatoric Trio No. 1 (2016)

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Preparing for a concert in 2016 she titled Phase Space, Peggy created the first (and only) trio in her Aleatoric series. She writes:

I remained fascinated by the richness of developing dances as part of the aleatoric series (in which I had the dancers call up remembered movements from past works and then explored their potency within a new choreographic framework), and during the research for locus plot I encountered the concept of “phase space” which provided a powerful and stimulating new model for working in this way.

In physics, “phase space” is a term used to describe a disruption of time and space in which the laws of dimensional continuity and evenly paced, sequential time no longer hold true. Phase space can be transformed like working bread dough by stretching, flattening, folding, rolling, punching, and shaping so that the original relationship between any two points in time and space shift in radical and unpredictable ways.

I think of memory as functioning along the same lines as phase space. Certainly, it is a realm that exists outside of the usual conventions of spatial boundaries and linear sequencing. Memory unravels, floats, dissolves, reverses, contracts, expands, and spirals. In my experience, memory has more in common with dreams, fantasy, poetry, music, literature, and painting, than with the chronological experience we expect it to capture.  A memory can languish in the constant flux of reinterpretation or become a narrative so polished it takes on the shining luster of a brittle shell. 

Working with Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, and Sahara Morimoto, I reconfigured the movement vocabulary they each brought forward as memories through the use of compositional structures, textures, energies, and themes that I pursued; by disrupting the space with a group of chairs (including two that were child sized) plundered from The Transparent Recital; by the integration of a demanding and far-ranging vocal score by Fides Krucker; and finally by situating musician John Kameel Farah on a ledge about 12 feet up on the back wall of the stage where he could look down to improvise an electronic score according to an open and spontaneous reading of his bird’s eye view of the performance.

Together, these contributions seeded a dreamscape unfolding within a shifting landscape of chairs, and revealing impulses, images, and oblique storylines that emerged from beneath the surface of the steps, amplified by voice, light and electronic sound. Reminiscing about this trio six years later, Sarah Fregeau said, “I loved that piece. All those chairs that were growled at and sung to.”

Aleatoric Trio No. 1 premiered as the opening work in a four-part program titled Phase Space, that also included Aleatoric Solo No. 1 for Sahara Morimoto, Aleatoric Duet No. 2 for Andrea Nann and Sean Ling, and the brand new Aleatoric Solo No. 2 for Kate Holden.

fractured black (2015)

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Just when she thought she had left performing behind, Peggy is persuaded to return to the stage. She writes:

I think it must have been late 2014 or very early in 2015 that I had my first exchange with Ilter Ibrahimof concerning a festival he hoped to launch in Toronto modelled on Fall for Dance, a long-running and hugely successful, multi-genre dance festival in New York City. He was hoping to launch Fall for Dance North in September 2015 and asked if I would dance a solo for one of the programs. I explained to Ilter that I was no longer dancing, that I was now fully dedicated to creating and presenting works for small ensemble and that I could recommend several dances for him to consider. But he wanted a solo, performed by me. When I explained that I had nothing suitable for such an event he offered to commission something new. I’m not sure where Ilter got this bee in his bonnet about having me on stage, but finally my manager also insisted that I not pass up the opportunity. I knew that if I was going to go on stage again it would need to break new ground through a first collaboration with someone new to my creative and performance world. By chance I heard some music by violinist Sarah Neufeld on CBC’s The Signal with Laurie Brown, and it turned out that Ilter had someone on his board of directors who could offer an introduction.

Sarah and I worked together remotely, meeting briefly for two days of rehearsal a couple of weeks before the premiere, and not again until the tech rehearsal on the stage of the (then) Sony Centre the day of the premiere. She had chosen a track from her upcoming album The Ridge (titled From Our Animal), that took off with the velocity of a gun shot. I suggested that she compose a brief opening sequence to ease both myself and the audience into the work. Sarah chose to add lyrics at the top of the track that began with the phrase “who we are in the dark.”

Looking back at the notes I kept from the early conversations with Sarah, these words and names still strike a chord: number magic, system modeling, fractals, groove, serial, measurement patterns, Jackson Pollack, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono. When asked by Ilter for a program note I wrote: fractured black splinters a dark and empty stage space to reveal two women – a violinist and a dancer – each caught up in the manic urgency of maintaining their presence. The speed, persistence, and drive of the cycling patterns of sound and movement insinuates that if either of them pauses, even for a moment, the light that illuminates them will be extinguished.

Being on stage together was completely thrilling for both of us. Over a coffee the morning of our second show I broached the idea of a large-scale work for my company, and Sarah responded by saying she was already thinking the same thing. I suggested using the opening line of lyrics she had written for our duet as our starting point, and so the journey that led to the premiere, four years later, of who we are in the dark began.

I remain ever grateful to Ilter for the way his invitation to me opened a whole new chapter in my creative life.

All photos of Sarah Nuefeld and Peggy Baker below are by Makoto Hirata.

locus plot (2015)

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This week we look at Peggy’s first ever full-evening work for an ensemble of dancers, locus plot. Peggy writes:

locus:
MATHEMATICS
a curve or other figure formed by all points satisfying a particular equation of relation between coordinates, or by a point, line, or surface moving according to mathematically defined conditions
TECHNICAL
a particular position, point, or place

plot:
MATHEMATICS
to place a point on a coordinate plane by using X and Y coordinates
LITERARY
the arrangement or presentation of events that make up a novel or story

One night after watching a fantastic BBC science documentary with physicist Jim Al-Kalili entitled The Secret Life of Chaos, I ended up down a rabbit hole in cyberspace looking at graphic renderings of mathematical formulae illustrating principles of physics. These schematics looked to me like choreographic notation documenting places on the stage and trajectories for action, with dancers – represented by numbers or letters – and their relationships with one another expressed through the use of symbols such as brackets, and signs for actions such as add, subtract, multiply and divide. I immediately began musing about the idea of using a set of schematic renderings as a choreographic score.

I knew that I wanted to involve vocalographer Fides Krucker with this project in order to use voice to embellish dynamic energies. And I knew that she and I would benefit from some tutoring in math, ideally by someone who could fathom how concepts concerning energy, mass, space, relationship, and movement could be employed as the basis for a performance piece. We were fortunate to find the perfect tutor in mathematician, math education innovator, and award-winning playwright John Mighton.

Fides and I were both totally energized and inspired by the new systems and structures for creation that emerged through our tutoring sessions. Composer John Kameel Farah joined us, assembling a huge set-up for live performance including a grand piano prepared with contact mics, a computer and an electronic keyboard. Together, we developed a full evening work collaborating with a tremendous cast of dancer/vocalists: Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Kate Holden, Sean Ling and Sahara Morimoto. The Dora award-winning lighting design by Marc Parent incorporated projections of John Mighton’s hand written tutorial notes.

I always thought this piece had incredible potential to evolve and deepen through touring, but it was a large-scale production, and the possibilities never arose. However, on numerous occasions I did excerpt the closing solo for Kate Holden with a cluster of dancers dimly lit behind her in an upstage corner, and it never failed to speak to me of the awesome mystery of it all.

“…a wonder of intricacy and construction.” Kathleen Smith, NOW Magazine

“… math conjures ideas of a perfect universe, of elegance, harmony and precision. It’s these qualities that Baker is so good at both capturing and questioning in her piece… There’s a haunting tension between determinism and will in the piece. Tiny bits of chaos erupt and resolve within a system that may or may not be completely controlled.” Martha Schabas, The Globe and Mail

All photos by Makoto Hirata unless otherwise indicated.