Sylvan Quartet (1999)
For their tenth anniversary concert at the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall, the chamber group Amici – with then-members Joaquin Valdepenas (clarinet), David Hetherington (cello) and Patricia Parr (piano) – invited Peggy to create a solo choreography to be performed to Chan Ka Nin’s I think that I shall never see… written for Amici in 1993. Peggy explains further:
“Ka Nin had composed this work with a scenario concerning the environmental dangers of deforestation and identified each instrument with a “character” central to this issue, (cello/tree, clarinet/bird, piano/woodcutter). Initial performances of the work included staging and performance devices to illustrate the composer’s notions. For this anniversary concert, I was invited to create a completely re-visioned staging.
Choreographically, I set out to embody the equivalent of a fourth line of music in the score. Just as the musicians do not play non-stop in this work, but each have a line of music that includes entrances and conclusions, moments of great presence and passages of subtle support, I shifted among varying degrees of visual prominence. Between choreographic episodes I walked quietly to my next starting place, with the resets planned to allow for a moment of stillness proceeding each new sequence. Fleeting images of the composer’s original characters emerged and dissolved from time to time through my body. I positioned the musicians as far apart as possible, both to create space in their midst that I could move through, but also to set up a spatial and auditory tension among the musicians so that they were functioning at a vulnerable threshold. My overarching aspiration was to match the superb artistry of the composition’s abstraction, the clarity and depth of the musician’s performance, and to bring the dance into the work as a fully integrated visual/kinetic element.
Ka Nin embraced my presence in his inspiring work with incredible grace and generosity, and it was a rare treat and a great honour to dance within a performance of his music by Joaquin, David, and Patricia.” - PB
To read more about what you can do to stop deforestation in Canada visit the Wilderness Committee.
The pianist featured in the YouTube link to I think that I shall never see above is David Maggs, currently an Innovation Fellow at The Metcalf Foundation and author of a profound paper called Art and The World After This, highly recommended for folks working in the performing arts and trying to figure out what to do in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, expansive new technologies, the climate crisis, and the urgency for racial justice and equity. Get comfy though, it’s not a quick read.
