Pelléas et Mélisande (1997)
This week’s blog looks at the only show in the Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ repertoire to feature an orchestra! Peggy describes how she came to share the stage of Roy Thompson Hall with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra:
“My creative partnership with pianist Andrew Burashko attracted music audiences to our performances, including, in 1996, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s Assistant Artistic Administrator, Joanne Harada. Her excitement over seeing work that brought contemporary dance and live music on stage together led to an invitation from TSO Music Director Yukka-Pekka Saraste for me to perform on a concert program with the orchestra. Yukka-Pekka chose a program of three works all based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, an ill-fated love story that inspired darkly lyrical music invoking images of heady romance, tumultuous unraveling of expectations and a tragic outcome.
I turned to James Kudelka as a choreographer who could handle the demands of narrative and character, as well as the magnificent but challenging possibilities of having a single dancer share a concert hall stage with an orchestra. The program opened with a chamber orchestra of 30 performing Fauré, Pelléas et Mélisande, opus 80; progressed to a full orchestra for the Sibelius, Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, opus 46; and then to an augmented orchestra of more than 100 players for Schoenberg’s Pelléas and Mélisande: Symphonic Poem, opus 5.
As the orchestra grew, the space in which I danced shrank until I was dancing in a space of only about 6 feet by 6 feet, virtually back-to-back with Yukka-Pekka. The power of dancing in such close proximity to the orchestra and the conductor was overwhelming. At times the music hit me with the power of surging water and though the allusion sounds crazy, and also quite funny, I felt as though I was a surfer riding the crests and curls of the sound.
Jane Townsend designed and constructed a series of incredible dresses for me, each appliquéd with motifs of flowers and leaves. The massive skirt of each dress fell heavily as I stepped and then billowed wide with every turn. James’ choreography was rich and grand, full of jumps and spins. This dance was performed just twice with the TSO and has never been staged again, and not a single photograph of this dance exists. But the experience of dancing at Roy Thompson Hall with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Yukka-Pekka Saraste, in a work created for me James Kudelka in dresses by Jane Townsend was absolutely unforgettable, and I hold it as one of my most treasured memories.”
From James Kudelka: “What I really remember is the rehearsal with the orchestra in the afternoon of the premiere, with just the TSO musicians and the conductor and Peggy on the stage and me watching her dance these three dances without any of the problem of wondering if it was anything more that just artists at work, with no one else watching, and thinking that I was a very lucky man to be collaborating with such a magnificent group of people.”
“If the Baker-Kudelka contribution was the briefest of the concert, it was also the most vivid.The dancer would always appear at some point midway through the music, her arrivals and departures had an uncanny air of mystery, like Mélisande in the play - and fill what limited space was available to her… But Baker doesn’ need a lot of room to be eloquent… she was an immense force even in a tiny area.” Urjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail
To read more about story-telling in classical music, visit WQXR here and see Jukka-Pekka Saraste in action, conducting Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite.
