The Perfect Word (2014)
I have a deep appreciation for durational dance works – performances that continue over an extended span of time with the audience arriving and departing as they wish at any point along the way. Choreographic works in this vein lend themselves to ceremony and ritual, to open structural forms that swell and subside incrementally, and I love offering the audience the chance to slow down and simply witness a dance performance almost the way they would take in a painting or a night sky.
Eager to create a new work for Nuit Blanche 2014, I imagined a collection of ten, 6-minute solos with spoken word cycling constantly over the course of 12 hours – each dance focused on a single word and each dancer speaking in a different language. Turning to longtime collaborator Debashis Sinha, I asked if he could create a score that would be developed over the duration of the performance by sourcing words spoken by audience members at an open mic. My idea was that each hour a new layer of sound would be overlaid on the recordings of the prior hours. With a long series of illustrations projected onto the wall behind the performers, audience members were invited to step up to the microphone and, speaking in any language, match a word with the picture. Deb layered these voices, creating a soundscape that constantly increased in density.
There are more languages spoken in Toronto than in any other city in the world. The Perfect Word celebrates the cultural multiplicity of 21st Century Toronto, the beauty and potency of hearing people speak in their mother tongue, and the richness and authenticity of a fully embodied voice.
The words at the heart the solos, the extraordinary dancers for this project, and the languages they spoke were: FLOWER / Sahara Morimoto / Japanese; WHEEL / Meryem Alaoui / Arabic; FIRE / Mateo Galindo Torres / Spanish; TREE / Jesse Dell / Cree; LADDER / Louis Laberge-Côté / French; KEY / Sarah Fregeau / English; HEART / Nova Bhattacharya / Bengali; BOAT / Zhenya Cerneacov / Russian; FEET / Ana Groppler / German; CLOUD / William Yong / Cantonese.
In 2016 The Perfect Word was presented as part of in/future, a site-specific festival on the abandoned west island on Ontario Place in Toronto, where it was performed in cycles of 3-hours with a new technicolor, moving projection design by Jeremy Mimnagh.
The Perfect Word film - by filmmaker Midi Onodera.
credits
choreography:
Peggy Baker
original score:
Debashis Sinha
dancers:
Meryem Alaoui
Nova Bhattacharya
Zhenya Cerneacov
Jesse Dell
Sarah Fregeau
Ana Groppler
Louis Laberge-Côté
Sahara Morimoto
Mateo G. Torres
William Yong
premiere
7 pm October 4 to 7 am October 5th, 2014
Betty Oliphant Theatre, Toronto ON
Nuit Blanche
subsequent presentation
September 15 - 18, 2016
abandoned west island, Ontario Place
Toronto ON
April 10, 2022
Betty Oliphant Theatre, Toronto ON
Celebrating Peggy Baker
HEART - performed by Nova Bhattacharya
photography
All black and white photos by Makoto Hirata
