Geometry of the Circle (1993)
Now well into the third year of Peggy Baker | Solo Dance, Peggy is generating much of the new work herself, collaborating largely with Toronto-based musicians and composers. This early period of her work as a choreographer established live music as a distinguishing feature, with the musician not present as an unseen accompanist, but as an equal performance partner alongside her onstage.
“For this second work together, Ahmed Hassan and I started by reversing the rules we’d established for Sanctum, in which we were set far apart, each confined to our own small rectangle of space, and for which Ahmed’s music was comprised purely of percussive sound. For this new work, we had sculptor Janet Morton create a set of three objects to define the circumference of a circle, and Ahmed and I discovered and pursued one another within this miniaturized world. We thought of ourselves as entities with distinctly different modes of expression and communication: Ahmed a creature for whom sound was primary, and me a creature of gesture and action. Wearing a wireless mic, Ahmed careened about the space in his manual wheelchair while I bounded and scampered away from him and toward him, finally meeting face to face, stepping inside the footrests of his chair, grasping him by the shoulders, and lowering myself to squat back on my heels while we met eyes and he “sang” to me.
An invitation to revive Geometry of the Circle for performances as part of the cultural celebrations for the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver led to a decade of rich collaboration with the vocalist Fides Krucker. First interpreting and reconstructing Ahmed’s extraordinarily eccentric vocal score, Fides then taught it to performer Mark Brose, coaching him in the intricacies of a virtuoso performance that he shared with two exquisite dancers: Alison Denham and Sahara Morimoto.
Geometry of the Circle is as dear to me as a love letter, inscribed with the disappearing ink of live performance.” PB
"Hassan...earthbound...confined to a wheelchair... (Baker) his velvet-jointed sylph...a celebration of mutual power, and of constructive differences." - Robert Everett-Green / Globe and Mail
Read about Janet Morton knitting a cozy for an entire house on Ward’s Island here on Torontosavvy.com. For a more academic analysis of Janet’s work, read Emily Jane Rothwell’s Master’s Thesis here.
