Peggy Baker Dance Projects
At the Betty Oliphant Theatre
March 6-9, 2008

    Even into her fifties, Peggy Baker can seem ageless as a dancer. Her tall, toned body, with its strong back, long arms and legs, and amazing flexibility, seems to withstand all of time’s burdens, without diminishing her remarkable skills. As a choreographer, she sets stunningly high standards for herself, and she is, therefore, able to easily meet the standards of other, younger choreographers. In Portal, she presents two older pieces (Yang and Brahms Waltzes), a new piece (Portal), and then pairs with Michael Sean Marye to dance James Kudelka’s A Woman By A Man, created especially for her. The overarching idea is that of a gateway or entry into the inner self or soul.

   Portal is the sort of solo that is caviar to the connoisseur. A ten-minute piece, danced in total silence (except for her audible breathing) in small, grainy rectangles of light subtly created by Marc Parent (her lighting designer of choice), it illuminates every aspect of Ms. Baker’s body, expressing its sharp angularities, contortions, collapses, and recoveries. Her long arms have a whirling force as she moves them in windmill fashion, but the dance also resorts to broken phrases and dramatic pauses, as she tests the body’s maximum elasticity, tension, and poise. Baker has described this piece as a duet for light and her body, but I would also call it the yoga of dance. 

   In Kudelka’s A Woman By A Man, an extended duet with Michael Sean Marye, performed to Shostakovich’s “Piano Trio #2” (played live by cellist Shauna Rolston, violinist Benjamin Bowman, and pianist Andrew Burashko), she changes her appearance, dance style, and silhouette. The title is appealingly ambiguous: it connotes the idea of a woman being loyally and steadfastly by a man’s side, as well as the idea of a woman defined by a man. Certainly there is fervour in the tone, an almost militant intimacy, as she hooks one hand under her male partner’s shoulder joint, clinging to him in a way that is sentimentally old-fashioned. She and Marye look like the couple out of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and the piece itself, in its very tight, restricted vocabulary, has a dour quality.

   When others dance to Baker’s choreography, the results are interesting for what they reveal about her lyricism. Yang (first created as a solo for Sylvain Brochu, but now a duet for Louis Laberge-Cote and Sahara Morimoto) incarnates one of the major principles of Taoist philosophy, without seeming a merely academic and dry exercise. Set to the driving, rhythmic recorded music of Belgian composer Thierry de Mey, it has a non-stop diagonal, angular physicality, with sharp gestures, dramatic pauses, and floor gymnastics. Laberge-Cote’s masculine line, pelvic thrusts, and straight, sharp angles contrast with Morimoto’s feminine contortions and waist-bends on a horizontal line, but the overall character is of something dry, hard, and upward moving with extensive use of stage space. The vocabulary is an eclectic mix of Oriental, martial arts, animal gestures and some stock-in-trade movements of interpretive dance (such as long, sweeping, circular runs), but the tempo is relentless.

   Far more rhapsodic—partly because of the music performed by Burashko on piano—are the Brahms Waltzes, as danced by Jessica Runge and choreographed as a personal exploration, with Martha Graham as a starting point. In a long black dress, with V-shaped neckline, Ms. Runge dips and sways, pauses, and blooms, lending her imprint to Baker’s charming choreography in yet another exploration of the body as a gateway to the soul.

photos of Peggy Baker: John Lauener


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