Phase Space

The four works that make up Phase Space are remembered dances that didn’t yet exist. When we set off, I assigned each dancer the task of calling up the moments, gestures, actions and phrases from their repertoire with me that live most vividly and deeply in their body. These excavated fragments provided the seeds for dreamscape memory dances that reveal impulses, images and oblique storylines that emerged from under the surface of the steps.

In physics, phase space is the 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 shifts in radical and unpredictable ways.

Composing this work has been deeply fascinating for me as a choreographer, but my ambition with Phase Space has been to create a set of four dances that each possess striking and unique identities that transcend the methods, mechanics, and mysteries of making them.

choreography: Peggy Baker

music: John Kameel Farah

vocalography: Fides Krucker

lighting design: Marc Parent

dancers

trio / Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Sahara Morimoto

solo / Sahara Morimoto

duet / Sean Ling, Andrea Nann

solo / Kate Holden

Awards

Winner of the 2015/2016 Dora Mavor Moore award for...

Outstanding Sound Design-Fides Krucker and John Kameel Farah
Outstanding Lighting Design – Marc Parent

Booking

Phase Space is available for main stage touring. Presenters with a password may view the duet from Phase Space.

duet from Phase Space

Bookings and information: Meredith Potter

Reviews

“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.”

— Aleatoric Duet No. 2, Kathleen Smith, NOW Magazine