The Perfect Word (2014)
This week we’re looking at Peggy’s 4th durational work created for Nuit Blanche, The Perfect Word, inspired by words and languages, expressed through the bodies and lived experiences of 10 outstanding Toronto-based dancers. Peggy writes:
I have a deep appreciation for durational dance works – performances that continue over an extended span of time with the audience arriving and departing as they wish at any point along the way. Choreographic works in this vein lend themselves to ceremony and ritual, to open structural forms that swell and subside incrementally, and I love offering the audience the chance to slow down and simply witness a dance performance almost the way they would take in a painting or a night sky.
Eager to create a new work for Nuit Blanche 2014, I imagined a collection of ten 6-minute solos with spoken word cycling constantly over the course of 12 hours – each dance focused on a single word and each dancer speaking in a different language. Turning to longtime collaborator Debashis Sinha, I asked him if he could create a score that would be developed over the duration of the performance by sourcing words spoken by audience members at an open mic, with the idea that each hour a new layer of sound would be overlaid on the recordings of the prior hours. With a long series of illustrations projected onto the wall behind the performers, audience members were invited to step up to the microphone and, speaking in any language, match a word with the picture. These voices created a soundscape that constantly increased in density.
There are more languages spoken in Toronto than in any other city in the world. The Perfect Word celebrates the cultural multiplicity of 21st Century Toronto, the beauty and potency of hearing people speak in their mother tongue, and the richness and authenticity of a fully embodied voice.
The words at the heart the solos, the extraordinary dancers for this project, and the languages they spoke were: FLOWER / Sahara Morimoto / Japanese; WHEEL / Meryem Alaoui / Arabic; FIRE / Mateo Galindo Torres / Spanish; TREE / Jesse Dell / Cree; LADDER / Louis Laberge-Côté / French; KEY / Sarah Fregeau / English; HEART / Nova Bhattacharya / Bengali; BOAT / Zhenya Cerneacov / Russian; FEET / Ana Groppler / German; CLOUD / William Yong / Cantonese.
In 2016 The Perfect Word was presented as part of inFuture, a site-specific festival on the abandoned west island on Ontario Place in Toronto, where it was performed in cycles of 3-hours with a new technicolor, moving projection design by Jeremy Mimnagh.
