Radio Play (2008)
As we prepare for Peggy Baker Dance Projects’ final stage presentation in September 2022 called Beautiful Renagades - which is a brand new play about dance in 1970s Toronto by Michael Ross Albert - we look back this week to 2008 at another of the company’s original play productions: Radio Play by Denise Clarke.
Peggy writes: Though I’d known her for many years prior, I think that Denise and I began talking about the possibility of a project together following the High Performance Rodeo presentation of a two-part evening by me featuring Doug Varone’s theatrical and highly stylized duet In Thine Eyes (with Larry Hahn), alongside the Sarah Chase dancestory The Disappearance of Right and Left.
Denise is a crazy-talented actor/playwright/director/dancer/choreographer whose genius as a creator, collaborator, performer, and mentor has been honed through her decades of research and realization as part of the renegade theatre company One Yellow Rabbit. Musing upon possible premises for a performance piece, she came up with the story of a modern dancer aged-out of the profession and on the hunt for a new job, and developed a script titled Radio Play. Denise’s program notes capture the spirit of the performance romp: A comedy, a self-reflexive gesture, a fable, an absurdist romance, a lecture-demo. A big change. A bigger fear. In the end it comes down to two people and a table and the future that is waiting. The sound design and composition by fellow rabbit, the late Richard McDowell, provided a tightly-built cue-heavy sonic scaffolding for the action, and Denise’s highly specific plan for lighting was realized by Lee Anholt.
In the end a complicated series of circumstances meant that I had three different performance partners for Radio Play. Larry Hahn premiered with me at Ottawa’s Nouvelle Scene as part of the 2008 Canada Dance festival; actor/playwright Michael Healy did a week run in Toronto as part of Soulpepper’s Young Centre Presents; and finally actor/dancer/playwright/choreographer Conrad Alexandrowicz performed with me at the High Performance Rodeo; each of these brilliant performance partners lining up for the extraordinary opportunity to be on stage in a work written and directed by Denise Clarke. - PB
Winner, 2009 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Choreography in a Play or Musical, General Theatre Division: Denise Clarke/Peggy Baker for Radio Play.
“…the performance by Baker serves to remind us of just what great artistry is – and how well it can be displayed in a work as good as this.” Bob Clark, The Calgary Herald
