Brute (1994)
Since returning to Canada in 1990, Peggy had exclusively engaged Andrew Burashko to perform piano works with her live - Ten Suggestions, Brahms Waltzes, Her Heart, Romeo and Juliet Before Parting and Accident. - but it was with this major work, Brute, started in 1993, that their collaboration really started to cook…
“Andrew and I had a small number of short works we performed, which I programmed one or two at a time. But in 1994, I suggested the idea of creating a recital program together. I was imagining a program for the two of us with the musical integrity and ambition to stand on its own as a piano recital. “In that case,” Andrew responded, “we need to choose some important music”, and he provided a list of piano works for me to listen to and consider. I chose Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6 in A major Opus 82. Composed in 1939/40, this is a work of epic proportions that holds within it the brutality, agony, perversion, and destruction of that time.
Early in the choreographic process I found myself overwhelmed by the scope of the music, but then a book gifted to me by my father (Howard Gartner’s Creating Minds) inspired the use of Picasso’s monumental painting Guernica as a primary reference. I was suddenly charged with choreographic ideas. The painting’s scale, its composition, the figures and objects it depicts, the history that it holds – all of the learning that arose from my research – is forcefully alive within the choreography, its essence vividly captured in the extraordinary costume by Jane Townsend and in Marc Parent’s sensational lighting.
Brute became the centrepiece of a concert program titled music for piano and solo dancer that premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for the Vancouver Recital Society in April of 1994. For the next 16 years Andrew and I continued to build a repertoire together with unforgettable performances in theatres and concert halls across Canada and in New York, Los Angeles, at Jacob’s Pillow, in Copenhagen, Ghent, and The Haag.” PB
"stark and disturbing" Kaija Pepper, Dance International
To read more about Picasso’s Guernica visit Artnews.com here.
To read more about this work, and the theme of androgyny in Peggy’s work, visit The Dance Current here.
To learn more about the genesis and creation process for Brute, watch the episode of Peggy’s Influences and Intersections below.
