Self Portrait: From the Personal to the Universal

Peggy Baker (2012)

Van Gogh with his bandaged ear. Jeff Koons’ marble bust of Jeff Koons. Annie Leibovitz meeting the gaze of a camera’s lens. Cindy Sherman in a wig. John Lennon singing about Julia, Yoko, Sean, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Eminem rapping about rehab. Robert Lepage employing his genius to labour on a big budget avant garde production about being employed to labour on a big budget avant garde production. Robin Williams, Sandra Shamas, Russel Peters, et al, ranting about the absurdities of their lives. Michael Moore on his filmmaker-soapbox-bandwagon. Composer, novelist, playwright, and poet Paul Bowles penning a memoir.  Margie Gillis, Kazuo Ohno, Susanna Linke, and Douglas Dunn dancing their own choreography. Alexander Scriabin scratching notes in the key of E flat minor onto a lined page, and contemplating whether he might play them as an encore for his recital the following night. This scene with Scriabin is pure fantasy, but you see where I’m going with this, and I’ll continue by quoting the playwright and actor Michael Healey from Are You Okay, (a play about himself): “There is a mystery at the heart of our lives, John Cage, it’s true.”

We are plagued by questions of identity, purpose, and meaning, by our inability to remember our birth, comprehend our consciousness, or imagine our death. We are each so much alike, and yet so utterly unique. We have gifts, deficiencies, advantages, or limitations due to circumstance, accident, by dint of effort or the luck of the draw. We find ourselves in harmony or discord with the natural world, society, our family, our closest friends. We fall in love with a person, a song, a book, a painting, a poem, a voice, the way someone moves. We feel out of sync and then, out of the blue, while playing a game, fulfilling an assignment, in a particular landscape, singing, working in the garden, in conversation at the dinner table, we feel vibrantly in tune – connected, spontaneous, and capable. We have ideas, impulses toward creation. We are drawn inexorably to music, dance, drawing, sculpting, writing, or acting. We want lessons with a great teacher, to test ourselves through the challenges of training and in relation to others who share our passions.

Why is that? What is going on in a mind at work on the creation of a score, a poem, a painting, or a dance? What does it feel like and how does it work on us to have an idea, to follow our instincts, experiment with possibilities, come to a decision, challenge our own choices, see something working and not know how we came to it, realize that what we were pleased with yesterday is unconvincing today, or complete something and know it is good. And what is at work in a cellist playing Bach, an actor playing Shakespeare, or a dancer stepping into one of Marie Chouinard’s solos? Do we discover something of ourselves in performing the work of another? Is the creator rediscovered? Do we have anything of substance to bring to the work of another? Can we do damage to a work by failing to meet its challenges? Can we do justice to a work if we are diligent and honest? Can a work make of us a greater artist? Can we deepen the appreciation of a work through the strength of our performance?  

One of the most daunting challenges I have encountered in my dance life was an hour-long solo, loin, trés loin, created for me by Paul-André Fortier. It went absolutely against the grain of my technique and physicality. I couldn’t tell without the feedback of the rehearsal director, Ginelle Chagnon, whether I was inside or outside the aesthetic. The dancing was grueling to the point that I could barely get through it, and it left me thoroughly battered and spent. This was a solo made expressly for me, and I was terrified that I would humiliate myself as a performer and fail Paul-André as a creator. But some extraordinary things can happen when we are thrown beyond the outer reaches of our comfort zone and we are required to embody a physicality far removed from the self-image we like to affirm. Our strengths and weaknesses are laid bare; we are forced to deal with things we’d rather avoid; we see, and are seen, through a new lens; everything is at stake, so now there is something of real interest and importance to share. My program note for loin, trés loin was a thank you note to the choreographer for helping me to move beyond myself and toward something higher:

I have become a very different dancer, even in some way a reinvented woman, by virtue of being set in motion by Paul-André Fortier. It is as if his dance asks, “What if this had been the case? Would you not now have become someone else?” So embodying a rewritten history, I navigate a new fate.

As dancers, we are shaped by the works we perform, and that impact goes beyond our professional lives, directly to the personal sphere. As choreographers, we express ourselves on a kinesthetic and aesthetic level, but that expression is a direct translation of our imaginative, experiential, and intellectual lives, our basic humanity. Immediately following the premiere of loin, trés loin, and in the wake of its influence on me, I began work on Unfold.

My friend the choreographer Doug Varone says that while he was not always conscious of it while making his dances, when he looks back at his work he can see the experiences he was going through in his life captured with uncanny clarity by his choreography. Choreographer James Kudelka once described to me the thought of writing his memoir based on following his works in chronological order. We speak of the output of an artist as their life’s work or their body of work, phrases that return us immediately to the flesh and blood person and to their personal history.

I am of the opinion that all art offers a multiplicity of self-portraits. That we take in a portrait of the creator and also of the performer, and further, that as audience members we also experience an unsettling, sobering, reassuring, inspiring, or challenging portrait of ourselves. That resonance through our bodies and souls with works that hit us forcibly and whose impact is undeniable, that glimpse we catch of the very heart of the mystery, is the experience of fully receiving a work of art: a flash of human creativity that captures a universal truth.

Photo credit on Collected Essays - Self Portrait:
Strand (2005)
dancer and choreographer: Peggy Baker
photo series: V. Tony Hauser