Welcome to the Creation Catalogue Blog!
We’re currently building a brand new website that Peggy has titled The Creation Catalogue. It will be an online searchable archive that documents more than 30 years of creation, production, touring and professional development undertaken by Peggy Baker Dance Projects.
The Creation Catalogue Blog will post features on the company’s history from Peggy and guest contributors. Our inaugural post is of course from the company’s founding artistic director, principal dancer until 2010, and now choreographer and choreographic director, Peggy Baker:
The photograph we’re using for the banner of The Creation Catalogue was taken by Josef Astor in New York City in 1992. Lise Friedman – a former Cunningham dancer who was then the editor of the award-winning quarterly, Dance Ink – arranged a shoot with Josef for a photo feature in the publication. I was instructed to arrive at a side door of Carnegie Hall, take the elevator to the sixth floor, then find a back staircase and climb a few steps to arrive on the eighth floor. (How does that work?) The apartments and studios of Carnegie Hall were famous for the artists living and working there and, (feeling like I really had no business being there), I hesitantly roamed the maze of corridors until I found Josef’s door. I knocked at a tempo approximating my nervous heartbeat. A tall and exceedingly handsome man with a glowing smile threw open his door to me. Light streamed through a huge slanting skylight onto the studio floor and a seamless paper backdrop. Josef took movement portraits of me in costume for my dance Sanctum, Mark Morris’s Beautiful Day, and Accident by Annabelle Gamson. I had also brought a long, deep purple stretch velour dress that I had found in a sale bin at Vivienne Westwood’s Soho shop a couple of days earlier and I put in on to improvise for the camera. The moment that Josef caught in this photo inspired the second of four dances in Her Heart, choreographed the next year. - PB
For more reading on Josef Astor and his Carnegie Hall studio, visit improvised life here.
Photos below of Peggy Baker by Josef Astor, appeared in Dance Ink Fall 1992 issue Vol 3 No. 3.
