Aleatoric Solo No. 2 (2016)
In 2015, I made an unforgettable trip to Japan with the dancer Sahara Morimoto, who was at that time the Artistic Associate with my company. We had been invited by Helen Price to teach a week-long workshop for the Yokohama Ballet Academy, and we made it the centrepiece of a 3-week adventure that began in Kyoto and finished in Tokyo. At the Yokohama Museum of Art, we saw a spectacular retrospective exhibition of work by Takashi Ishida, and I was especially struck by a massive canvas that stood tipped up on its corner in the centre of a gallery. This canvas had been painted on over and over again in successive iterations. It had been gashed. It had light projecting onto it. It was an object, and an artifact of its making. It also presented an environment into which one entered. It was a performance.
The memory of my encounter with Ishida’s installation continued to work on me, and at some point I imagined the blank canvas with which he had begun. I thought about myself beginning a new work and my sense that I can never begin with a blank slate, an empty canvas, a tabula rasa. Rather, I have a sense that my fallibility, my flaws and inadequacies, the complexities of my history as both a person and an artist, mean that the “canvas” upon which I am working is already marred, marked, damaged. And so I took this idea of a “damaged canvas” as the central metaphor for my final aleatoric dance, a solo for the magnificent Kate Holden.
With a huge unpainted canvas ripped open with a long slash and tipped on its corner centre stage, Kate inhabited a world of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, within which she embodied prowess, vulnerability, fear, elation, fatigue, angst, and courage.
Her heroic solo – hugely demanding physically and vocally – closed the four-part program Phase Space. Composing each of those works was deeply fascinating for me as a choreographer, but my ambition with them was to create dances that possessed striking and unique identities that transcended the methods, mechanics, and mysteries of making them. The iconic American choreographer Merce Cunningham spoke eloquently on this point in relation to his own work: “Even with all this preparation, however complex it is, if it doesn’t become dance, then it’s meaningless.”
Aleatoric Solo No. 2 premiered as the opening work in a four-part program titled Phase Space, that also included Aleatoric Solo No. 1 for Sahara Morimoto, Aleatoric Duet No. 2 with Andrea Nann and Sean Ling, and the brand new Aleatoric Trio No. 1 with Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau and Sahara Morimoto. - PB
credits
choreography and costume design:
Peggy Baker
improvised music:
John Kameel Farah
vocalography:
Fides Krucker
dancer:
Kate Holden
awards and nominations
Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Composition/Sound Design, Dance Division: John Kameel Farah and Fides Krucker.
Dora nominations for Outstanding Production (Peggy Baker Dance Projects), Outstanding Lighting Design (Marc Parent), and Outstanding Performance (Kate Holden).
premiere
Toronto
January 22 - 31, 2016
Betty Oliphant Theatre
concert title: Phase Space
January 28, 2016
Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto
COC Free Lunchtime Concert Series
concert: reassembled
media links
See 2016 in the media and awards archive
Filmed at the Betty Oliphant Theatre, January 2016. Performers: John Kameel Farah, Kate Holden
photography
All photos of Kate Holden by Jeremy Mimnagh.
