Portal (2008)
This week Peggy reflects on her Dora Mavor Moore awarding-winning solo (Outstanding Performance, Outstanding New Choreography) Portal, a work danced in silence:
Portal is a solo of about 16 minutes that emerged as I poured over a book that was a gift from my husband – Untitled, a collection of the final photographs of Diane Arbus taken between 1969 and 1971 documenting residents of an American institution for neurologically atypical adults. I had always appreciated Arbus’s work, and this book brought together some elements and images that hit an unexpected chord. Mortality was very much front of mind for me at that moment, and I recognized in these photographs intimations of the profound paradoxes of grandeur and fragility, kinship and abandonment, joy and grief that underlie each life.
As the choreography developed it seemed to deliver me to a vantage point from which one could look beyond the known world, and from which there was no turning back. I described myself to lighting designer Marc Parent as being “stranded in an ocean of darkness” and asked him to break the dance into a series of discrete events, each isolated in a different place on the stage. His design for Portal is masterful, as rich and engaging to dance with as music. Performances of Portal over the next five years were deeply satisfying for me, but eventually, it was beyond my grasp.
In the summer of 2021, the Corkin Gallery in Toronto presented an exhibition of work by Diane Arbus and hosted a performance of Portal by the superb Kate Holden. Kate’s rendering of this dance in the presence of Arbus’s photographs was a hugely significant experience for me, and I hold fast to the indelible memory.
“Beginning from clear and simple premises, Baker generates a rich and abundant expression that suggests a thousand and one questions of identity. A great success.” Stephanie Brody, La Presse
“the economy and expressiveness of a fine etching…heroic, mysterious, sublime.”— Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star
Read more about Dian Arbus’ collection Untitled here on nytimes.com
