Ten Suggestions (1981/1991)
While with The White Oak Dance Project, I had the extraordinary experience of dancing Ten Suggestions, a solo that choreographer Mark Morris had made for himself ten years earlier, in 1981. I had been in the audience when Mark premiered the solo at DTW (Dance Theatre Workshop, now New York Live Arts), and had been so thrilled by his performance that I went home and wrote a poem in an attempt to capture what it had felt like to witness him.
The man in the pink silk pajamas was spectacular;
Casals playing in the light of Liberace’s candelabra.
I saw Nijinsky dance in 1981.
For White Oak, Mark had double cast me with one of the greatest dancers of all time, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and to be in the studio with the two of them together was as exhilarating as it was intimidating.
Mark is a great big guy, soft and floppy and flamboyant. He tosses off impressive turns and balances with the greatest of ease and he is supremely musical. Misha is like a greyhound, small and perfectly proportioned. He is lean and muscular, and there is nothing he can’t do well. One of the greatest classical dancers of all time, he is handsome and sexy to boot. I am a tallish, angular modern dancer, somewhat androgynous. My proportions are odd, but somehow everything balances out. Depending on the dance, I tend toward extremes of either cool abstraction or deep emotion.
It was an unusual choice for Mark to cast both Misha and me in a solo he had made for himself. With no basis for comparison, because of the drastic contrasts among us, I realized that I had been in the habit of comparing myself to other dancers rather than thinking of myself purely in relation to the choreography.
Picture this: for the very first step of the dance you wait several bars, then suddenly appear from the up right wing, pull off as many pirouettes as you can in a couple of counts and then drop to a crouch. Any choreographer would dream of having Mikhail Baryshnikov for a moment like that. But whatever Misha did, I was going to have to treat it differently, because I’ve never gotten around more than three times in my entire career. The immediate and enduring lesson on that one was to focus on the dance and to consider and explore ways in which to meet the challenges of the choreography, rather than lamenting my inability to choose options that are only available to others.
I also got a better sense of the fact that sometimes it is simply the physique of a dancer that makes something work in a particular way. Mark’s lush bulk was splendid for the Duncanesque dance with a ribbon. Misha was so low and compact for the somersault / crouch phrase that it read like the kind of optical illusion a clown uses to squash his height. And my extra long arms were the perfect length for the deco sequence with the hoop. You can’t compete with that kind of thing, you can only think of it as a gift in terms of the dance.
Mark was incredibly generous in the way that he rehearsed Misha and me, taking tremendous pleasure in seeing the dance reinvented by each of us. One of my strongest memories from those rehearsals is of Mark, head thrown back, laughing his wild cackle over the delightful beauty, or crazy out-of-character look of some moment. Misha loved to talk things over with me. How did I approach this or that, what did I think of the way he had chosen to do something. Was I aware of having lost some detail or of having changed something he thought worked well. That same openness and curiosity was sustained through the performances as we supported each other with a comment or question and continued to observe each other’s work with interest and appreciation.
I gave my very first performance on a night that Misha had been scheduled to perform and when the stage manager announced the change of casting, I stood on stage behind the curtain ready to begin and heard the entire audience groan in unison. Not that I blamed them, because they had come expressly to see Baryshnikov (who did perform in every other work on the program), but oh, what a way to make a debut in a role!
When I made the decision to strike out on my own rather than continue with White Oak, Mark immediately offered Ten Suggestions to me as a gift. Can you imagine?! He gave me a dance! And in receiving that gift, the course of my creative life changed in profound ways. Mark’s work is always danced to live music, and in seeking out a pianist as my performance partner I found Andrew Burashko, who became my most constant and influential collaborator and performance partner for the next 20 years. PB
"Ten Suggestions opens with Baker, dressed in silky pink pajamas, crouching and tumbling onto a stage otherwise occupied by a cane-backed chair, a hula hoop and a hat. The first part is all long, loose limbs, beautifully articulated by Baker...she goes on to conquer successively the various props and finally is herself whipped around by the music, as though she's become its prop. The movement is rich, almost baroque, in a thoroughly modern way, with its pure design and intricate detailing." Alina Gildner, The Globe and Mail
related link
Read about Peggy’s move from New York to Canada, with a stint with White Oak Dance Project in between, in Peggy’s blog post White Oak and the Great White North.
credits
choreography:
Mark Morris
music:
Alexander Tcherepnin
(Bagatelles, opus 5)
piano:
Andrew Burashko
lighting design:
Marc Parent
dancer:
Peggy Baker
premiere
Toronto
February 13 - 16, 1991
The Betty Oliphant Theatre
Danceworks & The National Performance Network
Peggy Baker & Tere O’Connor / the neo-romantics
subsequent presentations
Montreal
February 21 - 24, 1991
la Bibliotheque nationale
Tangente
media links
See 1998 and 1991 in the media and awards archive
photography
As credited.
