Le charme de l'impossible (1990)
This week we hear from Peggy on the solo she choreographed for herself while in the midst of leaving New York City, and travelling to various destinations for teaching engagements:
“I bartered my way into my debut as a solo dancer by agreeing to lead the May intensive workshop for Contemporary Dancers (in Winnipeg, my fifth year in a row) if then-Artistic Director Tedd Robinson would program me in his festival there. I was extremely curious about what I might make if I stepped into a studio to choreograph on myself.
I teamed up with the accompanist for my intensive classes, pianist Mark Kolt, and we started out by designing an elaborate rhythmic structure that we each held to. Mark had the rare and magical ability to take a pen in each hand and write a single sentence, from the middle out, with both hands simultaneously! Riffing on this, we devised a multitude of arch structures where phrases mirrored rhythmically or went into retrograde melodically from their half-way point. Mark made reference to arch systems employed by the composer Olivier Messiaen, who had used the phrase “le charme de l’impossible” to describe his fascination with the subliminal affects of reversals.
As with every dance, you are working things out in terms of your artistic practice, and there are also the complexities of your life - your inner world, your psychology - that you are working your way through simultaneously. In this case, what I was working at and what I was carrying were inextricably bound together. From the compositional premise to the movement language, there was a primary set of influences at play that unmistakably drove the dance. The choreographer Charlie Moulton could just as easily have made the solo for me; and if he had, he would have been under the sway of no one but himself.” - PB
For more reading on Olivier Messiaen and his arch structures, visit the Pirates and Revolutionaries blog here.
