Peggy Baker | Canadian Dance Icon

this identity: woven | since then | unmoored
February 20 & 21
8PM
Timms Centre for the Arts, Second Playing Space

Peggy Baker is a Canadian dance artist who believes wholeheartedly in the beauty of the dancing body. This body celebrating its aliveness in the here and now. Originally from Edmonton, Peggy has built a powerful international presence, and yet, her performances are defined by her simple honesty, her humble nature and her beauty.

this identity: woven danced by Derek Souvannavong.

SINCE THEN is danced byJacquline Ethier and Sarah Hopkin, two dancers from the Ottawa dance community who offer the audience a sublime ( YES! SUBLIME!) interpretation of Peggy's choreography which beautifully and tenderly explores the here and now through each individual's eye.

UNMOORED brings us Peggy's phenomenal skills as a powerful dancing woman, a woman with stories to tell, a woman who eagerly gives of herself. Choreographed by Sarah Chase, UNMOORED is a work that offers us the experience of celebrating every aspect of life as experienced through the heart of Peggy Baker.

this identity: woven
Performance and movement invention:
Derek Souvannavong
Creative process, choreographic composition, direction:
Peggy Baker
Music: Duet for Heart and Breath / Richard Reed Parry / Nadia Sirota (viola), Richard Reed Parry (piano) Pour Anne-Marie Lemay (Fourteen Remembered) / composed and performed by Ahmed Hassan (angklung) and Louis Simao (double bass) / used with permission

Music for Marcel Duchamp / John Cage / Stephen Drury (piano)

“this identity: woven, is one of two works created through Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ RBC Emerging Artists Program in the fall of 2022.  My intention with this final iteration of the program was to co-create solo dance pieces through collaborations that bridged generations, cultural frameworks, and artistic practice; and that employed text as foundational source. Derek Souvannavong’s application to the program was extremely exciting. He described his ambition of “re-finding and sharing my voice as a Lao-Canadian dance artist within a western form”; of wanting to “explore the beauty of Lao language, its fonts and meanings, its beautiful curves, lines, definition and content, the shape of each letter and the placement of the vowels, accent and tone markers that envelop each consonant to create a complex variety of sounds.” I had proposed an interest in using text as a foundational source for movement invention as a premise for this co-creation project, so our interests were deeply aligned.

We began our first day together in conversation and I took notes throughout. Toward the end of our session, I read back to Derek the thoughts I had captured and asked if there was something that struck a particularly deep chord with him. He chose the statement “I don’t know what I want to reach or how I want to reach it, but I want to bring it into a space with others”. I used this quote as the spine, the vertical axis, for a word score I built using the notes I had taken during our conversation, and this served as the framework for our creative process.

As has been my practice for past many years, we worked in silence and began to source music once we had a full first draft. Derek and I quickly and easily agreed on three of short pieces by Richard Reed Parry, John Cage, and my late husband Ahmed Hassan, suspended within brackets of silence.

Derek moves with elegance and simplicity. He is mindful and precise. Every action he makes is etched clearly in space and exactly placed within a rhythmic structure. He is grounded in a kind of dignity that touches me profoundly.” - PB

since then
concept, choreographic composition, direction: Peggy Baker
movement invention: Peggy Baker with the dancers
original score: Debashis Sinha
costumes: Peggy Baker
lighting design: Gabriel Cropley
dancers: Jacqueline Ethier and Sarah Hopkin

“since then arose out of the retrospect of age. I have insights now that I wish I could share with my younger self. There are conversations about love, sexuality, loss, and old age that I would dearly love to have had with my late mother. There are truths about my life that I have never confided and need to find the courage to share and discuss. I offer this dance as an invitation for conversations among women.” PB

premiere: June 2, 2022; ODD Box; Ottawa Dance Directive
The creation of since then was made possible through the support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Ottawa Dance Directive and The School of Dance (Ottawa)

unmoored

choreography and direction: Sarah Chase
text and performance: Peggy Baker
sound design: Debashis Sinha
Arabic vocalist: Maryem Hassan Tollar
recording of Nina Simone used with permission
lighting design: Marc Parent
technical director / stage manager: Gabriel Cropley

“In 2003 I turned to the dance artist Sarah Chase to make a work for me. Sarah creates in a genre she calls dancestories, and preliminary to working together she set me the task of writing two stories for every year of my life. When the time came to go into the studio together, I told Sarah that there was one aspect of my life that I hadn’t written about and could not share in the public sphere. Sarah agreed to my caveat, and we went on to create a piece titled The Disappearance of Right and Left. In March of 2017, I sat down at a desk, in a small room, in a huge house in Bogliasco, Italy to remember and write the stories I had not been ready to share. Over the next months, Sarah and I worked together to distill my writing as a dancestory titled unmoored. The episodes I recount in unmoored describe events during the 20-year arc of my marriage to the musician, composer, and disability rights activist, Ahmed Hassan.” PB

unmoored

in midnight water

no waves, no wind

the empty boat

is flooded with moonlight

(Eihei Dogen / Japanese Zen master / 13th century)

premiere: February 21, 2018; Franco Boni Theatre / The Theatre Centre; Toronto

unmoored was created through support to Peggy Baker Dance Projects from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council; with the invaluable support of a fellowship with the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy; and through subsequent residencies at Tiamat House on Hornby Island B.C., (through the generosity of Judith Lawrence); and Ottawa Dance Directive, Artistic Director Yvonne Coutts / Associate Director Lana Morton.