A Peggy Baker Dance Projects Presentation
at the Enwave Theatre, Harbourfront Centre
February 24-28, 2010

   At 57, Peggy Baker remains a marvel. She dances in two pieces—one choreographed by herself—and yields the floor to three other much younger dancers in a third piece of her own devising, and she proves yet again that there is no one else like her in the dance world. Inspired by Lewis Thomas’s classic science essays in The Lives of a Cell and Montreal artist Sylvia Safdie’s paintings, Baker has turned her attention to the physical world of insects as a metaphor for our own human options as social creatures. In “earthlings”—the most explicit link to Thomas and Safdie—she makes superbly economic yet precise use of her long hands, fingers, legs, and back to suggest a creature, more insect than human, struggling against gravity, isolation, confinement, and death. Sometimes, she suggests a beetle on its back struggling to upright itself towards the light. Mounted near the edges of a narrow, inclined platform (painted in Safdie swirls of earth tones), she stretches, flails, contorts herself, as her body describes amazing elliptical contortions and creates extraordinary semaphores in Marc Parent’s subdued lighting and to Debashis Sinha’s exotic music.

   In “armour,” choreographed by Doug Varone, she and Larry Hahn (another amazing senior dancer) participate in a new version of a duet originally created in 2007 and loosely based on imagery in Lewis Thomas’s scientific classic. This is an extremely intimate piece, beginning in a cone of light with the two dancers moving from rest to tender touch to erotic suggestiveness and subtle alterations of gesture and body movement. The dancers change positions, with her becoming dominant as she mounts him sideways and then on his back, and she even subdues her by a palm over his mouth. Rife with the sense of tactility, the piece is sometimes as tender as the barest touch, as subtle as the curling or uncurling of a finger, or as charged as a hand on the abdomen or one that embraces, pulls, and holds a body in a dynamic interplay of forces in which touch can be armour as well as amour.

   Not surprisingly, “coalesce” (a brand new piece) disappoints because it lacks Baker’s own presence. It has her choreography but the trio of dancers—Kate Holden, Sean Ling, and Sahara Morimoto—though fine dancers in their own right, seem more mechanical than organic in their movements. Their frilly tunics seem absurd at times when not simply perplexing, and there is too much stationing with sculpted poses reminiscent of Greek or Oriental art. The angularities are strong edged, with joints and elbows conveying power, but there are too many clichéd moments. Or is just that they seem clichéd because they are not danced by Baker herself? Unlike “earthling” and “armour,” there is more of a balance between floor work and the upright position, but the uniformity of gesture and vocabulary suggests something preordained and mechanical, even though there are moments of intimacy when Ling rests his head on Holden’s shoulder and their arms enter into a mutual embrace as Morimoto dances some distance from them. As Morimoto later becomes a part of a complex entanglement, the piece successfully describes a coalescence of organisms, but I found it abstract and coolly distanced. 

pic 1: Peggy Baker in 'earthling' (photo: John Lauener)

pic 2 (L-R): Kate Holden, Sahara Morimoto, Sean Ling in 'coalesce' (photo: John Lauener)




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