earthling (2009)
Throughout the 1980s I made regular visits to Montreal to teach classes and lead intensive workshops at Les Ateliers de Danse Moderne de Montreal, an ambitious training program established by Linda Rabin – one of the most influential teachers in my own life – and Candice Loubert. While I was in town, Linda always made a point of taking me to the studio of her great friend, the visual artist Sylvia Safdie, so that I could see Sylvia’s latest work and hear about the preoccupations that were driving it. Over the course of more than 20 years I was privileged with a rare view of the arc of Sylvia’s work. On a visit in 2007, Sylvia showed me a series of films of she’d recently done and shocked me completely by offering one of these to me as a possible premise for a dance. The film was a close-up of a beetle on its back, in its death throes. Sylvia had worked choreographically with the footage, slowing it down, creating repeated loops and reversals of action. I found the film both sorrowful and exquisite. I had no idea how I might approach it, but I accepted her gift in all humility.
That same year I happened to made a trip to Dia Beacon, where I encountered – among a multitude of deeply affecting works – a series of large plywood “boxes” by Donald Judd. These objects were cubes, closed on all sides, but with the top set part way down into the interior, tipped in one direction and tilted in the other, and with the complex angles of each edge perfectly fitted into the sides. Looking down into the box I felt as though I was looking at a maquette of a stage gone wildly awry and with the proscenium providing a view from above rather than from the front.
I had images from Sylvia’s beetle and Donald Judd’s boxes rattling around in my head when I got an invitation from Day Helesic and Julie-anne Saroyan to present a work for their series Dances for a Small Stage in Vancouver. The venue was a Legion Hall on Commercial Drive with a stage that was truly and remarkably small. Riffing on Judd’s boxes, I immediately thought of this as the perfect opportunity to install a tilted and tipped floor that would fill the entire stage. Putting myself down onto this surface without ever getting up on my feet created the illusion that the audience was looking down on me, and this possibility sparked the idea of working with movement ideas related to Sylvia’s beetle.
Larry Hahn created a fantastic floor for me, supported by a substructure of struts, and I painted the surface in a way that I thought suited the world of the struggling creature that I had stranded on its surface.
Everything alive on Earth is caught up in the cycle of birth and growth and death that is also a source of renewal and transformation. - PB
related links
To explore Sylvia Safdie’s exhibition As I Walk, visit YouTube here.
Watch Peggy’s 2020 short, Influences and Intersections - Donald Judd and Sylvia Safdie to discover more about earthing.
credits
choreography and performance:
Peggy Baker
music:
Debashis Sinha
set design:
Larry Hahn
lighting design:
Marc Parent
costume design:
Caroline O’Brien
premiere
Vancouver
January 22 & 23, 2009
The Legion on the Drive
Dances for a Small Stage / PuSh Festival
subsequent presentations
Toronto
February 24 - 28, 2010
Enwave Theatre
Confluence
Vancouver
March 20 & 21, 2012
Roundhouse Performance Centre
Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture Festival / Vancouver International Dance Festival
Cultural Olympiad Vancouver 2010
media links
See 2010 in the media and awards archive
photography
As credited.
