Following is a list of works commissioned from Peggy Baker from 1990 - 2023 by artists, companies and groups.

creative process, choreographic composition, direction: Peggy Baker
movement invention and performance: Katherine Semchuk
sound design: Julian Anderson-Bowes
lighting design: Gabriel Cropley

to be here arose through Katherine Semchuk’s dedication to journaling, physical practice, and improvisation, all employed with specificity and intentionality in the making of a dance through a deeply collaborative relationship. PB

preview: Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto ON, April 28, 2023

choreography: Peggy Baker with the artists of CRIPSiE
rehearsal director: Ainsley Hillyard

dancers: Julie Andrews, Heath Birkholtz, Sara Campos-Silvios, Mitch Chalifoux, Iris Dykes, Marisa Hayden, Bobman Jeffrey, Rebecca John, Kasia Maisonneuve, Angela Menley, Rosie Nay, Alison Neuman, Erin Neuman, Nicolle Pilon

premiere: L’Uni Theatre, Edmonton AB, November 17, 2022

concept, choreographic composition, direction: Peggy Baker
movement invention: Peggy Baker with the dancers
sound design: Debashis Sinha
costumes: Peggy Baker
lighting design: Gabriel Cropley
dancers: Jacqueline Ethier and Sarah Hopkin

My maternal grandmother was a suffragist, a woman fully engaged in the first wave of feminism that won most Canadian women the vote by 1940 – shamefully, Inuit women did not achieve suffrage until 1950 and indigenous women until 1960. Born in 1952, history swept me up in the second wave of feminism, in which access to the pill and legal abortion allowed women to chart their own futures, bolstered by the landmark writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, and informed by the indispensable handbook, Our Bodies Our Selves. A fourth wave of feminism, #metoo, tears back the curtain on the sexual abuse of girls and women that is so deeply entrenched in our society and continues to push forward the cathartic struggle for women’s rights as human rights.

Now that I am long past menopause, Simone de Beauvoir would describe me as being beyond ‘the grip of the species.’ and from this vantage point I have a profound appreciation for the pivotal moments that changed the course of my life. since then arose out of the retrospect my age allows me. I have insight now that I wish I could share with my younger self. There are conversations about love, sexuality, loss, and old age that I would dearly love to have with my late mother. There are truths about my life that I have never confided and need to find the courage to share and discuss. I offer this dance as an invitation for conversations among women. PB

… the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us

within us and against us, against us and within us.

Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

premiere: ODD Box, Ottawa Dance Directive ON, June 2, 2022

choreography: Peggy Baker
music: John Kameel Farah and Atilla Fias (from Pieces of Earth, 2011)
costumes: Alex Espinosa
lighting: Dean Cowieson
dancers: James Thomson Kacki, Johanna Riley, Sam Penner, Treasure Waddell

schema was inspired by a series of precise and elegant ‘locus’ diagrams, schematics that present visual renderings of mathematical equations. Portions of schema were developed with ensemble members of Peggy Baker Dance Projects – Sarah Fregeau, Benjamin Kamino, Sahara Morimoto, and Mateo Galindo Torres – and during a residency in Vancouver for Co.Erasgo. PB

premiere: Rachel Browne Theatre, Winnipeg MB, April 24, 2014

choreography: Peggy Baker
music: John Cage (Music for Marcel Duchamp, 1947)
dancer: Brian Lawson

on earth was inspired by an Anselm Kiefer painting titled The Renowned Orders of the Night, in which a man in a desolate landscaper lays on his back under a black sky shattered by stars. The movement arose by translating a poem by John Cage as though it was a set of instructions for choreography. That poem begins: not A / lifE / stAtement it has to be / a Deliberate / helpless stateMent / it hAs to be / final. PB

premiere: Dance Theatre Lab, Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, Purchase, New York, February 12, 2010

choreography: Peggy Baker
music: Bjork
set design: Larry Hahn
costume design: Gwen Ethier, Jacqueline Ethier
fascinator: Chapeaux de Madeleine
dancer: Jacqueline Ethier

For my brother Bruce Smith, who knows how to build a house and how to make a home.

In his book The Poetics of Space, the french philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about miniature as “false objects that possess a true psychological objectivity.” That notion, along with Bachelard’s striking and profound ideas about how the spaces we inhabit both reflect and shape us, inspired the images that set the choreography in motion.

premiere: ODD Box, Ottawa Dance Directive ON, March 14, 2009

choreography: Peggy Baker
text: Nova Bhattacharya
original music: Ed Hanley
costume and set design: Caroline O’Brien
lighting design: Roelof Peter Snippe
dancer: Nova Bhattacharya

premiere: Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto ON, December 12, 2002

concept: Sylvie Bouchard
choreography: Peggy Baker
original music: Catherine Thompson
costume design: Cheryl Lalonde
lighting design: Aisling Sampson
dancer: Sylvia Bouchard

premiere: Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto ON, April 29, 1999

choreography: Peggy Baker
assistant to the choreographer: Sahara Morimoto
dancer: Caroline Woods
music: Kurt Swinghammer (Valentina from Vostok 6, 1999)
costume design: Caroline O’Brien
lighting design: Roelof Peter Snippe

for Pat Miner

Rocket Girl was created for Carolyn Woods, at the invitation of Serge Bennathan, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Dancemakers.

premiere: Premiere (now Fleck) Dance Theatre, Toronto ON, November 16, 1999

co-choreographers: Peggy Baker and Richard Daniels
music: Henry Cowell
costume: Caroline O’Brien
dancer: Richard Daniels

 premiere: fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists, Buddies-in-Bad-Times Theatre, Toronto, August 14-18, 1998

dancer: Sylvain Brochu
music: Thierry de Mey
costume: Caroline O’Brien
lighting design: Hugh Connacher

Yang is one of the two major principles of Taoist philosophy. Represented in writing by the ideogram for the sun’s rays, and in hexagrams of the I Ching as an unbroken line, yang is all that is bright, dry, hard, masculine, round, odd-numbered, and upward moving. PB

premiere: NAC Studio, Canada Dance Festival, Ottawa ON, June 12, 1998

Yang was created for Sylvain Brochu in 1998. In 2003, the original solo was superimposed with a second reconfigured version and performed as a duet by Sylvain Brochu and Shannon Cooney.

choreography: Peggy Baker
music: Peter Garland (Walk in Beauty, 1992)
pianist: Henry Kucharzyk
costume: Jane Townsend
lighting design: March Parent
dancer: Sarah Chase

premiere: music DANCE array, Premiere (now Fleck) Dance Theatre, March 19, 1997