Krishna’s Mouth (2006)

Solo Dance

Mar 29

For an outdoor performance in the Toronto Music Garden on Queen’s Quay West, cellist Shauna Rolston and I performed a version of The Transparent Recital tailored to the setting, and to complete the program I asked her to open with a work that she would perform without me. Shauna chose Songs of Songs, a gorgeous work for cello and tape by Japanese/American composer Karen Tanaka. I instantly fell in love with this score, its slow spirals of melody tenuously interlacing and then floating apart on the currents of the underlying drone, and with crystalline bells piercing the undulating surface of the sound.

I reached out to Ms. Tanaka immediately to explore the possibility of choreographing a solo to this piece and when it turned out that no recording existed that I might work with she allowed me to arrange a recording session with Shauna. I took the recording with me to Circuit-est in Montreal where a teaching residency included studio time for my own creative work. I have vivid memories of the sound resonating in the spare studio and of the strong pull of the music into an unexpected narrative sphere.

I had been pouring over Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, a book in which she brings together myths and stories from across epochs and cultures as a way of contemplating how one might come to terms with the underlying existential sorrow of human life. At the time, I had just made the huge and dismantling shift from being my husband’s primary caregiver (he lived with a particularly aggressive and chronic form of multiple sclerosis) to his living in long-term care, and the sadness and guilt attached to this situation was tremendous. One story in Dillard’s book struck a particularly deep and resounding chord for me. It is a story about Lord Krishna as a baby. He’s with his mother, in a garden, and he’s crawling on the ground. He grabs a clod of earth and puts it in his mouth. His mother slaps his hand away, and when she reaches in to clean out the dirt, she sees the entire universe in his mouth. As a caregiver to my husband, I had felt as though he needed me to guide him and keep him safe, but this story turned that idea on its head and proposed him as my teacher, which he surely and far more truly was.

In dancing this work I speak this story out loud, many times. I understand that this story is not mine to tell. But it is a story that I needed to hear, a story that somehow found its way to me, and a story that lives in my body.

credits

for Ahmed Hassan

choreography, text and performance:
Peggy Baker

music:
Karen Tanaka, The Song of Songs

lighting:
Marc Parent

costume:
Caroline O’Brien

subsequent performers:
Natasha Bakht
Andrea Nann

awards

2006 Dora Mavor Moore award nomination for Outstanding Performance, Dance Division, for Andrea Nann

preview

Thornhill, Ontario
September 30, 2005
studio of Menaka Thakkar Dance Company

premiere